Italian street artist Agostino Iacurci recently teamed up with All City Canvas to support the children of Camp Best Friends summer program in Atlanta. In a workshop hosted by Iacurci, the children created imaginary portraits that were later put together to compose a large 150ft mural in the Ben Hill neighborhood. Titled “Wallter”, their collective piece took the artist almost nine days to complete.
In anticipation of his upcoming solo show at Wunderkammern in Rome, Italian artist Agostino Iacurci recently completed the mural “Zero Infinito” on the facade of a school near the gallery. A depiction of two anonymous protagonists climbing a ladder that loops into infinity, the mural evokes the central theme of Iacurci’s upcoming show, “Small Wheel, Big Wheel.” According to the artist, the show explores the act of playing. Iacurci’s new work is simplified and geometric. The personalities of his portly, masculine figures are most likely different in the eyes of every viewer, with only abstract shapes and a minimal color palette to convey the mood of each piece. “Small Wheel, Big Wheel” opens February 8 and will be on view through March 22.
Italian street artist Agostino Iacurci paints using a vocabulary of flat shapes, blowing up the geometric forms to an enormous scale to compose larger-than-life illustrative works outdoors. Primarily focusing on characters, Iacurci’s murals adapt to the contour’s of a building’s surface, converting apartments and even prison yards into storybook pages of sorts. Iacurci’s style brims with whimsy and humor, but the shapes he renders coalesce into somber characters who appear to express a sense of disillusionment and foreboding at times. Iacurci also works in a smaller scale in his drawings and etchings, which apply a more expressive approach to his subjects. Take a look at some images courtesy of the artist.
Opening April 21 at Galleria Patricia Armocida in Milan, Agostino Iacurci’s solo show “Appearance and Disappearance” features new paintings and assemblages that riff on the artist’s signature characters. Iacurci’s designs of these anonymous figures have a graphic sensibility: Their faces are composed of simplified, geometric forms that typically come in red, black, and blue. For “Appearance and Disappearance,” Iacurci breaks down these figures further, using their forms as a structure for introducing surreal visuals. In the weeks leading up to the show, he also put up two enormous, hand-painted billboards that tower over the Cadorna Square and Loreto Square, two highly-trafficked points of Milan.
Argentinian artist Francisco Diaz (aka Pastel) uses a distinct visual language in his murals. He fills his walls with patterns based on the local flora of the area he’s painting in — an effective way to connect with the communities he encounters in his travels. His botanical references often address history, geography, society, and politics. Along with these nature-based elements, Pastel often paints ancient, Stone Age tools to glorify humanity’s strength without referencing a specific culture. His distinct yet decorative style lends itself well to collaborations with other street artists, such as Pixel Pancho and Agostino Iacurci, who both worked with Pastel recently.
Paris’ Galerie LJ currently has a group exhibition called “Paragone” that shines a spotlight on a geometric, abstract current of the Italian street art world. Featuring works in a variety of media from Moneyless, Pane, Tellas and Agostino Iacurci, the four-person show surveys different styles of abstraction. Between Moneyless’ mathematically precise paintings, Pane’s collage-like graphite drawings, Tellas’ minimalist figurative ink drawings and Agostino Iacurci’s bold, graphic paintings, the show covers vast aesthetic ground. Take a look at some of the works in “Paragone” after the jump, images courtesy of Galerie LJ. The exhibition runs through April 27.