Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Anthony Lister the 33 year old Australian painter and Installation artist, notable within the Lowbrow art movement, whose work is influences from a number of areas and genres, including street art, expressionism, pop art, and contemporary youth culture, has been featured by Nicholas Forrest in an Blouin Artinfo article titled ‘Aussie Street Art Star Anthony Lister’s Grimacing Graffiti Faces Go Global’. Forrest states “…Lister has been taking the urban art world by storm over the past few years with his painterly interpretations of grunge imagery. In well-reviewed exhibitions both at home and abroad, and frequent appearances in leading street-art publications, in 2011 he was also named one of the 50 most collectable artists by Australian Art Collector magazine… So what’s made him so successful transitioning his work from outdoors to indoors? One reason might be the confluence of subversive street aesthetic with high-art draughtsmanship in his work, making his images seem equally relevant and accessible in an up-market gallery as they do on the gritty walls of alleys. Lister is also proficient across a wide variety of mediums, as at home working with pens, stickers and aerosol as he is au-fait with different surfaces. And the subjects of his mainly figurative compositions are just as varied as his materials: sci-fi superheroes, clown-like characters, and licentious ladies appear as often as images of quite ordinary looking people. But the shared characteristics of his work, a signature blend of irony and decadence, are what make them stand out from the crowd; fed from his single-minded work approach. “The first rule of painting is to take everyone else out of the equation. I am the viewer, so I don’t underestimate my viewers,” he explains. “I can’t paint for anyone else.” Later, “it’s all about having the courage to say this is finished… It’s like being a soldier because I have to be hard as fuck to fall in love with these things and let them go.”

Inspired by Nicholas Forrest, Blouin Artinfo ow.ly/hnLUY Image source Steve Gray ow.ly/hnMfX

Terri Ciccone the American founder and editor of ContrappostoArt.com a street art enthusiast blog, has released an article on Blouin Artinfo titled ‘A Prognosis of Street Artist EKG’s Irregular Heartbeat’. Ciccone states “If you keep your eyes open, you can actually see a pulse of New York City everywhere. And I don’t mean “pulse” the way news anchors refer to it … I mean a beat, an ever streaming murmur, a recorded, monitored, living pulse. I mean street artist EKG’s orange heart beat running throughout the city. EKG’s tag, or “html link” as he sometimes thinks of it, is that recognizable blip on a machine that reminds us we’re alive. …More than 2,000 of these orange oil stick lines run along the bottom of walls like mice, and sneak through our feet as they slither down streets, go in and out of doors, run underground and live on beams holding up our subway stations, seeming to trail off into infinity. …And there’s a lot more to EKG’s tag specifically. The idea of symbol recognition is one that’s made a lot of people a lot of money, and one that is very relevant to our time. Think about the difference between the Nike symbol and the Occupy Wall Street tag, OWS. Both are highly recognizable but hold very different meanings. … EKG’s tag is not just another word scribbled in marker on the wall of the C train. It’s a creative reminder of who we are, where we live, and what kind of power our living, breathing bodies and minds can have.”

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Thierry Guetta the 46 year old French American Los Angeles based filmmaker and street artist known as Mr. Brainwash has been profiled by Matilda Battersby for the Independent in an article titled ‘Mr Brainwash: Banksy’s street-art protégé and his latest brainwave – The master of hype arrives in London for a blockbuster new show’. Battersby states “…when we met last month Mr Brainwash told me he still had no idea what to do with the 120,000ft space [the Old Sorting Office] and isn’t anywhere near finishing the work for it. He has the blind optimism of a child, and is convinced it will come together magically. …He propels himself through the conversation like a Duracell Bunny on steroids, wearing paint-spattered jeans and hoodie. His legs jiggle, his arms flap, he jumps up and down and uses his hands to draw in the air. He’s often been accused of being a fake. But after spending an hour in his company I’m astonished to find myself thinking he’s anything but: kooky, yes; scarily energetic, too; but endearing and bubbling over with vim. If this is an act then he deserves that Oscar. …he says: “I take everything seriously and I do everything with my heart. So when I got the chance of doing something I was like a mental patient who finally got to see a shrink. I vomited out everything I had inside.” … His signature style pitches somewhere between Banksy’s black and white stencils and Andy Warhol’s colourful prints. He draws straight on walls or prints computerized images onto large sheets of paper and pastes them up in separate pieces. It is a technique he learned while following Fairey and his work is now almost as ubiquitous in LA as Fairey’s own.”

Inspired by The Independent ow.ly/d0Lnl image source Facebook ow.ly/d0Lg3