Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Slinkachu Revists His Tiny Art Months Later

Bigger is better, unless you’re Slinkachu. The UK-based artist (previously posted on our Tumblr here) started placing his tiny figures around London back in 2006. Slinkachu sources these from a company that supplies model train products, and vintage 1960s toys, which he embellishes for his own purposes. He’s a big fan of artist Chris Ware, whose works also tend to use a vivid color palette and are full of meticulous detail. When we say tiny, we mean barely a centimeter high. Slinkachu has to use a magnifying glass to add details to his little people. If it wasn’t for his compelling photo series, they would be left completely undiscovered to passersby. He has photographed these humorous, miniature scenes all over the world in places like Cape Town, Doha, Berlin, and New York, to name a few. During the course of documenting his work, Slinkachu began to question: Just what happens to art that’s been abandoned on the street?

Bigger is better, unless you’re Slinkachu. The UK-based artist (previously posted on our Tumblr here) started placing his tiny figures around London back in 2006. Slinkachu sources these from a company that supplies model train products, and vintage 1960s toys, which he embellishes for his own purposes. He’s a big fan of artist Chris Ware, whose works also tend to use a vivid color palette and are full of meticulous detail. When we say tiny, we mean barely a centimeter high. Slinkachu has to use a magnifying glass to add details to his little people. If it wasn’t for his compelling photo series, they would be left completely undiscovered to passersby. He has photographed these humorous, miniature scenes all over the world in places like Cape Town, Doha, Berlin, and New York, to name a few. During the course of documenting his work, Slinkachu began to question: Just what happens to art that’s been abandoned on the street?


“Alpining”, six months later.

Rather than suffering defacement, Slinkachu noticed that nature began to take its course. In the case of his Fullham, London street installation “Alpining”, Slinkachu found that the artworks last quite a while. However, overtime, birds who are attracted to bright colors for their nests would ‘steal’ the figures, or the color mood would darken due to exposure, completely changing the dynamic. In the world of tiny street art, the work takes on a ‘life’ of its own. Slinkachu’s characters reflect the loneliness and melancholy of living in a big city- and over time, become more lost than before.

Can you spot Slinkachu’s latest work?:

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
You might remember Maser from our coverage of Justkids' "Life is Beautiful" festival in Las Vegas. There, the artist covered an entire motel with bold, diagonal stripes, turning the entire building and its parking lot into an Op Art-inspired installation. Maser is originally from Ireland, where he got his start (and nickname) from the graffiti scene in Dublin in the 1990s. Now based in the US, he still frequently works outdoors, though his style has morphed from traditional graffiti to expansive environments that he is able to achieve through the careful arrangement of just a few colors.
While it's possible to observe trees growing over the course of months and years, German artist David Stegmann aka Dust paints roots, branches and vines as sentient beings caught amid a state of evolution. In Dust's two latest murals, "Wohnzimmerwelten" and "Witness the Fitness," (both completed in Germany in the past two months) his otherworldly trees sprawl out across long walls (one of the pieces is 32 meters long) with force and momentum. The murals preceded the opening of Dust's current show, "Concrete Jungle," with Patricia Sandonis at Galerie Merkle in Stuttgart, Germany. Endowing plants with movement and speed is Dust's signature. The high-velocity branches take on new forms, reminding viewers of the powers that lie in the soil, the roots and the trees.
Spanish artist Liqen creates murals and illustrations filled with strange, botanical references. In his street art, giant plants seem to morph into various animals and objects, blurring the boundaries between various life forms — and the biological and the manmade. While his murals utilize a tropical color palette, his illustrations are starkly contrasting and monochromatic. He renders rich textures with precise line work, making his characters come alive in the process.
Berlin-based artist Vermibus shocks passersby with haunting public interventions, in which he replaces fashion advertisements with his own manipulated versions. To create the staggering, sometimes startling images, Vermibus splashes a solvent across the printed surface. The chemical reaction causes the faces and flesh of models, as well as the logos and brands they represent, to wash away. This process can be viewed in a video produced by Open Walls Gallery in Berlin.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List