Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, tweeted “Ukraine today is the center of attention, center of resistance, freedom, true art. @banksy confirmed that he created seven murals in different parts of Ukraine, including Borodianka, Irpin, and Kyiv. It means a great deal to us. We are so grateful, Sir!”

In Horenka, on the ground floor of a devastated apartment block hit by Russian bombs in March, one mural shows a man lounging in a clawfoot tub, scrubbing his back with a brush. “For me, it means washing off all the dirt. The dirt of the Russian Federation,” local resident Tetiana Reznychenko told Reuters. “And this drawing makes me feel as if I have cleansed myself of the dirt that descended on us.”

Reznychenko told reporters that she served Banksy’s team a mug of instant coffee in her apartment when she saw them outside in the cold. Her damaged building currently has no electricity, heat, or running water, but she’s using a wood stove to get by for now. “Winter has begun, and we don’t know what will happen next,” she told Reuters. “Firemen brought us non-drinking water… but it will freeze unless we move it inside.”

Another mural in Borodyanka depicts a man resembling Russian president Vladimir Putin being thrown to the ground during a judo match with a young boy. Putin held an honorary black belt in judo until it was revoked earlier this year by World Taekwondo. The fourth mural shows children playing on a seesaw made from part of a tank. The fifth mural depicts a young gymnast holding a streamer aloft, and the sixth is a woman in a gas mask bearing a fire extinguisher. They all share a common theme of resilience in the face of horror and destruction.

Located about 35 miles northwest of Kyiv, Borodyanka was besieged by Russian forces early in the invasion and suffered extensive aerial bombardment, with many buildings reduced to rubble. Most of its 13,000 residents fled prior to its Russian occupation in late February. When the town came back into Ukrainian control in April, returning residents found that even those structures that had escaped bombs and shelling had been ransacked and burglarized.

Ukrainians like Alina Mazur, a 31-year-old from Kyiv, have traveled to the Borodyanka area to see the murals in person. “This is such a historic moment for our country, that people like Banksy and other famous figures are coming here and showing the world what Russia has done to us,” she told Smithsonian Magazine.

The post Banksy’s Presence in Ukraine Confirmed by a Series of New Murals first appeared on Dornob.

The corner of the building acts as the face, while the main entrance is now the mouth. The eyes are adorned with enormous blue eyelashes. On either side are two giant arms made of tubular rainbow fabric. Overhead, a second vaguely owl-shaped creature appears to pop up out of the roof, waving its arms. The rest of the facade is covered in a brilliant paint job by Brissonet.

On Instagram, the artist explains that the rainbow arms came from damaged sheets from Delta Hotels. Her father installed the plywood for the windows and helped mouth the puppet mouth, while local artist Philippe St. Denis helped paint, glue, and cut the puppets, and fabricated a rotating mechanism for the head on top to allow it to spin (its nose even twirled!). For the performances, the puppets moved and spoke to a live soundtrack of violins and drums. The theme of the show was digestion, hence the giant mouth.

“Puppet making, painting, laughter, a broken nose, and a concussion, it all happened far so quickly!” says Brissonet. “This project was the definition of a collaborative effort and would have been impossible to do alone. I was so fortunate to have the support of my family, blood and otherwise to help me. This process was so special, but far too short. All this effort for only two 15 minute shows. It felt like the Monks making mandalas out of sand, only to be blown away soon after it was finished. It has taken a minute to digest all of the blood, sweat, and love that went into this piece. My psychic intestines are still full.”

“I love to paint but most of all I love to create an experience, this is where I can reach full satisfaction of my work, when I appreciate interaction and when a piece of art is moving. I’ve always been fascinated by automated marionettes and folk art. I think it is the best art on the planet, especially when it can reach the imagination of children; nothing touches my heart more. This is the beginning of a new era, who knows what dreams can come true? Maybe one day we can transform an entire city into puppets, bringing it to life like never before!”

About Artist Danaé Brissonet

Danae Brissonet is an international artist from Quebec, Canada known for incredible public murals, masks, illustration, and puppetry. Her work is often inspired by colorful folk art from Mexico, Puerto Rico, India, Spain, and Morocco and invites the viewer to consider the power of symbolism, myth, and metaphor.

The post Montreal Puppet Mural Turns a Street Corner into a Ravenous Monster first appeared on Dornob.

Entitled “Love Is in the Bin,” the piece made art history when it was first sold on the same auction floor in 2018. Immediately after the last bid for $1.4 million was declared the winner, an alarm bell rang and the painting, originally named “Girl with Balloon,” dropped halfway through a shredder hidden in the base of the ornate gold frame.

The spectacle was orchestrated by the artist, whose real identity remains a mystery, with the help of a remote-controlled mechanism inside the picture frame. The auction house insists it had no foreknowledge of the stunt, claiming later that they too were “Banksy-ed.”

“Some people think it didn’t really shred. It did. Some people think the auction house was in on it, they weren’t,” the street sketching legend said on Instagram the same year the shredding took place.

Although the artist’s intentions for this outrageous prank are unclear, the effect was undeniably a brilliant work of performance art. “When Girl with Balloon ‘self-destructed’ in our saleroom, Banksy sparked a global sensation that has since become a cultural phenomenon,” says Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s chairman of modern and contemporary art. “During that memorable night, Banksy did not so much destroy an artwork by shredding it, but instead created one. Today this piece is considered heir to a venerated legacy of anti-establishment art.”

That day, Banksy was the number one global trend on Twitter for several hours, giving the painting instant notoriety. The buyer of “Girl with Balloon” lent it to the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Germany between 2019 and 2020 in all its fringed glory. The gallery said that during that time over 180,000 visitors came to see the iconic art – roughly double their typical attendance.

Then in the summer of 2021, an unidentified European collector put the piece up for sale again, allowing it to go on a month-long world tour before sending it back to Sotheby’s, where it was displayed in a gallery all its own prior to the auction.

The London auction house estimated that “Love Is in the Bin” would fetch between $5 and $8 million during its second sale, but many art experts were not surprised when it went for much more.

“I expected it would make £20 million,” London-based dealer Acoris Andipa, a specialist in Banksy’s paintings and prints, told the New York Times. “It’s such an infamous work. Together with Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi,’ it’s been the world’s most talked-about artwork of the last two or three years.”

This time around, there was no additional demolition though. “I can’t tell you how terrified I am to bring down this hammer,” remarked Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker, at the end of nine buyers battling it out during 10 minutes of bidding.

Banksy’s most-expensive work prior to this sale, the pandemic-themed “Game Changer” sold in March 2021 for $22 million, with the proceeds going to the patients and staff at a London hospital.

Banksy got his start on the streets of Bristol, England in the early 1990s as a free-hand graffiti artist. Using children, soldiers, policemen, the elderly, apes, and rats as his most-common subjects, he’s become well-known for his stencil-style murals portraying anti-capitalist, anti-war, and anti-establishment motifs, and his carefully guarded anonymity has only added to his fame and mystique as an artist.

The post Half-Destroyed Banksy Art Shreds Sotheby’s Auction Record first appeared on Dornob.

Villa Trap consists of four linked spaces that progress from public to intimate as you move deeper into the building. The first, a large street-facing room, features a dining table and curving built-in concrete banquette seating encircled by a retractible neon yellow accordion-style screen, which mimics the actual security screen outside the glass front doors. This permeable enclosure can be fully opened to make the room feel bright and accessible, or drawn completely closed almost like armor around the seating area.

Just inside the main entrance, a small kitchen with deep blue cabinetry and a sculptural stainless steel vent hood is tucked into a circular alcove. The yellow security screen either grants or denies access to the hallway and brick stairs beyond, and from there, one can either descend into the basement studio or turn into Cain’s highly unique bedroom.

Lined with matte black tiles, the bedroom almost has a funhouse effect to it, its proportions blurred and multiplied by mirrors that stretch from halfway up the walls onto the ceiling. The first thing you see upon entering is a tub sunken into the floor, with curving pink screens separating this area from the bed for extra privacy.

Downstairs, past a graffitied wall and a red door, the spacious recording studio offers a second bathroom, another bed, a seating area, a desk, and a central recording booth. Covered in street art and slapped with a “Metro” sticker, it looks a lot like something you’d find at a transit station, and that’s exactly the point. Rooted in urban contexts, trap often makes references to the literal streets in which it originated. Iniesta’s design for Cain’s home and studio brings the textures, colors, objects and art you can find throughout Madrid and arranges them into a sort of elevated bachelor pad – just the kind of space you’d expect a rapper on the rise to inhabit.

Javier Jiminéz Iniesta graduated from the Alicante School of Architecture in 2007 and later founded Studio Animal, based in Barcelona and Madrid. He explains that “Studio Animal addresses the development of proposals related to ultra-contemporary thought and its links with the habitat in which we live; the rethinking of the spaces inhabited by the contemporary subject and the atmospheres I breathe are the center of [my] work, in pursuit of a super optimistic future for the potential inhabitants of his architectures. With a progressive specialization in the design of all types of interior spaces, Studio Animal moves from the small scale of industrial design, through the planning of the brand image, to the integral design of the spatial proposal, offering tailor-made projects for each client always under a very architectural vision.”

The post Inside the Street Art-Inspired Home Studio of European Trap Star Kaydy Cain first appeared on Dornob.

Banksy also posted a short film to his Instagram depicting his seaside tour in an aging camper, as he painted his signature stenciled murals on brick building facades, beachfront retaining walls, and other urban surfaces. The tone of the works range from lighthearted to slightly political, and one even consists of a brand new sculpture dropped into a town’s miniature village.

In Suffolk’s Nicholas Everitt Park, three painted children play in front of a storm drain alongside the words “We’re all in the same boat.” The work initially included a crude boat sculpture made of found objects, but the local government removed it due to concerns that it could block the drain during heavy rain.

In Katwijk Way, Suffolk, a seagull appeared on the side of the house, appearing to zoom in for a bite of trash out of an adjacent dumpster. In Lowescroft, a child with a crowbar sits beside a sandcastle in one work, while a rat leans back in a beach chair drinking a cocktail in another.

In Norfolk, three people dance and play accordion atop a bus shelter on Admiralty Road, and an arcade-style grabber reaches down to a bench at the beach. A sea wall in Cromer, Norfolk features a group of hermit crabs, one holding a sign reading “Luxury rentals only,” apparently a commentary on the contrast of high-end rentals and homelessness in the area.

In Great Yarmouth, the Merrivale Model Village got a surprise addition with Banksy’s own stable added to the scene. The miniature stable is graffitied with the artist’s name along with the tagline “go big or go home,” along with a rat doing a cartwheel.

Other works include an inflated raft floating away in the air with children dangling from it, painted outside a manmade pond in Gorleston, and a humorous addition to a statue of engineer and former mayor Frederick Savage in Guanock Place, King’s Lynn. The statue got a new pink tongue and an ice cream cone made of expanding foam.

Soon after they appeared, several of these works were vandalized. The rat was painted over, and jokesters added some spray-painted teddy bears beneath the arcade grabber. The Great Yarmouth Borough Council removed the inflatable raft image because it hit a little too close to home after the death of a three-year-old child from a burst trampoline on the same beach in 2018. The local councils rushed to protect the other works to prevent additional damage, covering them with clear plexiglas and in some cases hiring temporary security staff to keep watch. The miniature building was moved to a “safe location” and replaced with a replica.

It’s not unusual for Banksy’s works to be defaced or even chipped off and sold at auction, often by the owners of the buildings upon which they’re painted. In some cases, art dealers and collectors approach the owners and ask to remove them, like a Torquay hotel wall piece recently freed from its concrete wall with an angle grinder for John Brandler, who has previously paid six figures for other major Banksy murals.

The post Banksy Confirms New Staycation-Themed Seaside Murals in the UK first appeared on Dornob.

Set beside the entrance to the nonprofit theater and gallery Artist’s Television Access (ATA), a beheaded human-sized stuffed honey bear lies beside a guillotine, a pool of blood-red satin streaming from its neck. Anti-gentrification activist group Gay Shame wrote a message on the glass outside, the first letter of each word spelling out its name: “GUILLOTINE ALL YIMBYS SINCE HONEYBEARS ALWAYS MEAN EVICTION.”

The group explains that “fnnch’s ‘cute art’ is not the innocent beautification of the urban landscape; its autonomy as art-for-art’s sake is illusory and deceptive,” the group writes in an artist’s statement tucked into the flyer box beside the door. “It’s all a public relations smokescreen disguising dispossession, displacement, and destruction that benefits investors, developers, and other capitalists (AKA YIMBYs, the State’s BFFs.) Artwashing is a direct product to the complicity of people like finch and his fans [/stans] in the weaponization of art by real estate interests. They do this to increase property values, which forces out low-income renters of color; many of them trans or queer.”

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San Francisco has changed a lot in the last two decades, largely as a result of the tech industry that has sprung up around the Bay Area. The influx of wealthy transplants drove up the cost of living, instigated a housing crisis, dramatically worsened homelessness, and resulted in the displacement of many long-term residents, especially low-income minorities. Now the most expensive city in the U.S., San Francisco is rapidly losing the culture that made it an interesting place to live and visit in the first place, and the effects are bleeding into adjacent cities like Oakland.

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To activist groups like Gay Shame and other locals, mainstream (read: white and wealthy) LGBT people are part of the problem. The honey bear motif was already spreading through the city before the pandemic, but became even more prominent in 2020 and 2021, with mask-wearing bears appearing on buses and transit shelters; in March, fnnch sold a non-fungible token of a honey bear portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for $64,000. Then the San Francisco LGBT Center commissioned fnnch (a straight artist) to paint a large mural of three bears on its exterior wall, and the backlash exploded. In a recorded confrontation with another local activist, fnnch said “I’m from Missouri. I immigrated here. I’m an immigrant to San Francisco.” Needless to say, these comments didn’t help; his mural was defaced and then painted over with works by queer artists.

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Gay Shame first formed as a protest against the corporatization of Pride (hence the name), and is known for calling out instances in which the mainstream Bay Area LGBTQ+ community is complicit in gentrification and displacement. Their window display will remain in place through September 1st at 992 Valencia Street, and you can read more about their perspective at GayShame.net.

The post A Beheaded Honey Bear Illuminates Anger Over San Francisco Gentrification first appeared on Dornob.

“I often wonder what my soul would look like if it manifested itself as an object I could see and touch on this earth,” Woods says. “My artwork today looks to express the depth, growth, and complexity of the mind as well as its ability to encompass both light and dark spaces emotionally. I’d like to think you can ‘feel’ my artwork with your eyes.”

Woods has brought her beautiful murals across the world for street art festivals and commissions, and though you’ll occasionally spot a human figure, animal, flower, or other recognizable object in them, her most recent works have honed in on the graceful qualities of flowing fabrics. As she explained in an interview with the podcast Street Art Unearthed, she loves the way abstract art can conjure up emotions without using overt symbolism. As she honed her craft over the years, she came across a few art theorists that resonated with her.

“They were just talking about the abstract way of stretching your imagination, and also connecting with something other than what’s physically in front of you,” she said on the podcast. “There was a guy called Clive Bell that used to talk about aesthetic emotion and how you can really connect with a piece of art despite it having no narrative and just sort of exploring that emotional response you can have to an artwork. Learning about these theories did influence the direction my work then took after that. I’d say my last years of study I started to really push that. I was using realistic imagery that I’d taken, just photographs, and then blending into quite abstract patterns and painting on a really large scale.”

Some of Woods’ favorite projects include a trip to Norway to join an annual student festival wherein artists creatively repaint 1970s school buses from top to bottom, and one of her largest murals to date for the Heartwalk Festival in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. The latter project saw her scale a 30-by-60-foot building to cover its pale aqua facade in gold and amber ribbons. In 2020, Woods was also recognized for a project on London’s Burdett Road to thank the NHS for their hard work during the pandemic.

If you love her style, you’ll be happy to hear you can pick up some of Woods’ artworks in non-mural forms. In 2021, she collaborated with sustainable swimwear and activewear brand Tide and Seek to create a gorgeous series of garments splashed with her signature style, and she also puts works on canvas up for sale at her website, though they tend to sell out fast. Keep up with the artist on Instagram @itsrosiewoods.

The post Iridescent Veils Cascade Down Building Facades in Murals by Rosie Woods first appeared on Dornob.

Hyuro made her mark in the form of massive murals that covered the facades of entire buildings, which appeared in places like Brazil, Italy, Belgium, England, and The Netherlands. She began her career in a more traditional medium, painting on canvas, but began to experiment with street art in 2010, when she first moved to Spain. Taking inspiration from artists she met there as well as the activist muralism movement in her native South America, Hyuro quickly developed an emotionally resonant style featuring feminine imagery not often seen large-scale in public places.

The mostly faceless women you see in each of her murals are sometimes variations of herself, and other times representative of issues facing women and girls in a broader sense. Whatever the meanings of her individual pieces may be, there’s definitely always more to her work than meets the eye. An empty dress on a hanger, painted ten stories high for the CURO festival in Brazil, speaks out against the criminalization of abortion there, which has led to the death of many women. In Spain, the frilly cuffs on a traditional judge’s robe make reference to a controversial court case in which five men were acquitted of gang-raping a teenager.

Others are more mysterious. One Werchter, Belgium mural called The Dance as an Act of Resistance features blindfolded girls in pale nightgowns. Older women wearing aprons and holding spoons stand silently in Italian alleyways or support the entire community on a floating tea towel. We often see feminine hands performing domestic but essential tasks, like repairing broken vases, preparing food, or nursing babies. The women here are both hidden and revealed, overlooked and over-exposed. The colors are soft, the gestures graceful. The clothing could place the subjects in either the present or the distant past.

“In the end, if you don’t show time or you don’t show faces, you give more space to the viewer to finish the piece in their own mind, within their own beliefs,” said Hyuro in a 2018 interview with Juxatpoz. “It doesn’t close off anything for the viewer, it doesn’t have to be this person. It keeps it open to interpretation. I just give my contribution to a place, and people can finish the meaning themselves.”

A tribute by her friend Evan Pricco in Juxtapoz Magazine sheds additional light on Hyuro’s life, work, and legacy. Here’s a brief excerpt:

“Many will speak of her legendary status in the street art and mural art communities, and indeed, she was. But this was a career not yet in full bloom. If you went to a festival over the past decade, Hyuro was often the only woman participating, and as representation started to evolve in recent years, that was probably because of her. She was an original, not only in the street art realm, but within the whole art community. A rebellious spirit, philosopher, social observer, mother, always bitingly funny, passionate, and curious, she was timeless as she looked to the future.”

Rest In Peace, Hyuro.

The post Remembering Hyuro, the Street Artist Who Imbued Her Massive Murals With Feminine Sensibilities first appeared on Dornob.

“Colorama Skatepark,” set in an old 20th-century warehouse renovated by French architect Patrick Bouchain in 2004, is an installation created as part of Lille’s World Capital of Design 2020. Commissioned by La Condition Publique (the cultural institution currently occupying the warehouse), the indoor skatepark fuses the architecture of the space with new ramps and brightly-colored details.

The brick walls are reinvigorated with shoes of peach and pink, overlaid with bold murals in neon green, orange, red, and yellow. The concrete pillars that punctuate the interiors are also colored, making them feel like a more active part of the design of the space. Ilori’s colors and motifs derive, in part, from the details of the building, while the skateable features were developed in collaboration with local skateboarders and Decathlon skateboarding product manager Jean-Philippe Rode.

Those elements include two corner quarter pipes with banked ends, a volcano ramp, and a central hybrid module. All of these obstacles were made using FSC-certified recycled paper from Skatelite, a renowned manufacturer of premium skate ramp surfaces used by pro skaters. If you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of designing a skatepark, using paper for this purpose might sound odd, but Skatelite’s products are weather-resistant and nearly indestructible, designed to deliver a balance of speed and grip.

As you can probably imagine, the way projects like this are carried out has changed substantially due to the pandemic. Ilori participated remotely in the construction process during the coronavirus lockdown, overseeing La Condition Publique’s staff as they built and papered the new indoor skate park.

“It was important for me and La Condition Publique to design a skatepark that was inclusive and not intimidating but inviting for all ages and all levels of skateboarders,” Ilori says. “They really wanted to celebrate one of the different ways La Condition Publique, a cultural venue, can be used to bring people together, and they felt that I could create this experience.”

Colorama aims to engage the growing skater community in Lilles, France, also inviting BMX riders and other urban sports athletes to partake in the fun. Whether they’re engaging in skating, dance, basketball, or parkour, users get to enjoy a highly unique street art-inspired environment. The park opened in September 2020, and in the future, it’ll also host events and classes, including educational and employment opportunities.

“This project also finds its place in la Condition Publique’s will to forge a bond with its neighborhood,” reads the project’s press release. “By inviting neighbors to a warm and family-friendly space dedicated to sports, it allows them to gather together and get to grips with this cultural place, where they may [otherwise] feel as ‘outsiders/outcasts.'”

“La Condition Publique also shelters not less than 20 organizations from cultural and creative sectors and accompanies its neighbors in realizing their projects. In addition to this, it strives to enhance collaboration with the social, urbanistic, and associative actors in Pile, an underprivileged neighborhood in Roubaix where the venue is located. In that respect, la Condition Publique searches to organize rendezvous in various forms in order to generate new dialogs within this community.”

Ilori, who began his practice in 2011 as an upcycled furniture designer, draws many cultural influences together into his trademark visuals, including traditional Nigerian parables and West African fabrics. He likes each piece to tell a story, often bringing “Nigerian verbal traditions into playful conversation with contemporary design.”

The post Colorama Skatepark: A Vivid Urban Cultural Center by Yinka Ilori first appeared on Dornob.

Do you ever wonder how illusions like this work? Our brains perceive elements of what we view as either figures (the objects of focus) or ground (the rest of the space). Think of the classic example of the image that can either be two faces looking at each other or a vase (the negative space in between them). Visual cues like perspective, highlights, and shadows help our brains decide which is which, but sometimes we get it wrong — like in the case of the infamous blue and black dress (or was it white and gold?).

Designers and artists like Johnston can use those cues to make it look like flat, two-dimensional surfaces have 3D objects popping out of them. Sure, our rational brains know that these typographic murals aren’t really tumbling down the wall, but Ben’s mastery of the form results in near-perfect illusions that never fail to intrigue.

The “Heart of Gold” mural, for instance, has a delightful springiness to it that conveys excitement and enthusiasm. Johnston says it was created for a non-profit organization in Ontario around the idea that art can “inspire, transform, and help build a better community.” The town where the mural is located was once known for its nickel mining, so in homage, he came up with the slogan “City of Nickel, Heart of Gold.”

“I’ve always done art and painting throughout my school career when I was younger,” Johnston tells Typeroom. “After school I went traveling for a few years before deciding to study Product Design in Cape Town, South Africa. All the while studying I started playing around with graphic design and illustration. I dropped out of my course after a year and a half and decided to pursue graphic design. From there I got a job in a small agency and taught myself what I needed to know. After a few years of freelancing and working in ad agencies, I started working with lettering and type.”

The artist got his start with large-scale murals when a friend asked him to accent the entranceway of a new building. That was all it took for him to fall in love with the medium, and he’s been painting urban surfaces ever since, dividing his time between outdoor work and studio work for clients. On top of that, he also creates custom works for advertising, installations, and events, as well as his own fine art pieces shared in exhibitions.

“Raised in South Africa and currently splitting his time between Canada and the US, Ben has also been involved in various conferences and mural festivals around the world. As a multi-disciplinary artist and designer winning numerous awards for projects with Fortune 500 companies to working with a variety of NGOs, his main focus is on finding unique approaches to each opportunity, drawing on inspirations from his encounters throughout his travels.”

The post Ben Johnston’s Typographic Illusion Art Seems to Pop Off the Walls first appeared on Dornob.

Banksy’s been labeled a lot of things before: vandal, film director, activist, and graffiti-ist, depending on whose perspective is on display. But one title everyone can agree on is artist. Spanning across alleyways, streets, walls, and bridges around the world, but mostly recently throughout the London districts of Bristol and Birmingham, Banksy’s art explores a range of topics. His style is distinct, with elements of stenciling and a full dose of political and lifestyle satire.

Although Banksy has had his work featured in major exhibitions and offers people means of buying his work privately, his identity remains a secret, which is just the way he prefers it since his expression of art through graffiti is oftentimes illegal. He doesn’t have Facebook or Twitter accounts, but he does share his art via Instagram, which is the only way the world knows what his bathroom looks like during quarantine.

In a recent post, the artist noted that: “My wife hates it when I work from home,” with images of nine of his frequently-seen rats being naughty in the small bathroom. Working together, two rats appear to knock the wall mirror off kilter. A closer look sees a partner in crime marking tallys on the mirror’s glass while a fourth rodent peers down from the top. Perhaps they’re keeping track of their total days in isolation?

To the side, another rat dangles from a pull cord for the lighting, while another still is swinging from the towel rack while simultaneously squirting toothpaste from the tube onto the wall. Above the toilet, the mischievous vermin are unraveling toilet paper across the bathroom and preparing to dispense some hand soap on the unsuspecting floor below. The scene wouldn’t be complete without the quintessential rat hole where the wall meets the floor, of course. But perhaps the most disruptive of the bunch is the rat — is he really? — yes, the rat using the toilet with very poor aim.

While much of his work has sharply increased in value over time, including “Devolved Parliament,” a piece depicting chimpanzees in parliament that recently sold for $12.1 million, Banksy’s bathroom art will only be available for viewing online.

The elusive artist has a sorted past in the art world, first surfacing in the 1990s alongside other prominent street artists Kato and Tes. Together, the three adopted the moniker DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ). Over time, he was noticed by photographers, one of which later became his agent. Increasing in popularity, numerous original Banksy works have been removed from public locations and sold to private owners. Others have even listed photographs of his work for sale without Banksy’s permission.

Regardless of where each piece might be, the bulk of them incorporate a kind of anti-war, anti-capitalist, or anti-establishment theme. However, as recently as Valentine’s Day, a sweet and romantic image appeared to his credit of a young girl using a sling shot to spray flowers into the air. Unfortunately, the piece was vandalized, so photographs are really all that remains.

Although “underground,” Banksy keeps in touch with the world regarding his work, and is obviously using his time indoors to share a bit of his creative genius and a bit of much-needed humor, too.

The post Banksy Shares Mischievous “Bathroom Art” in the Spirit of Quarantine first appeared on Dornob.

Using the hashtag #StayArtHomePejac, the artist is encouraging people to reimagine their surroundings with paint or paper cutouts. After completing his own “window series” of artworks, he put together a simple tutorial showing how to join in on the fun. Even if you’re not artistically inclined, you can get great results by using your computer screen as a light box to trace imagery onto paper, cut your drawings out, and place them on the glass.

The artist explained the movement in an Instagram post, stating: “In these strange lockdown days, I believe that one of the best therapies to fight anxiety or boredom can be creativity. I have always believed as well, that there is an artist inside everyone. I encourage you to create your own ‘window series,’ true urban art at home. Let your imagination fly and post the results on social networks. Every piece of work counts to create an antidote against monotony. The pictures you send to my profile will be shared. Together we will defeat this virus!”

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Most participants choose to create simple paper figurines that interact with buildings, trees, and other objects visible from their windows. Some fun examples have included enormous cats stretching on rooftops, monkeys dangling from power lines, dinosaurs walking across hilltops, witches on broomsticks, and scenes that turn the sky into underwater scenes full of sea creatures.

“After only a few days the response of the public has been overwhelming with literally hundreds of submissions being sent in from more than 50 countries worldwide and counting. Reaching places all over Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Turkey, USA, Vietnam, Iran, India, Brazil, etc., the initiative is poetically standing up to the spreading of the virus. Having a new, simple way to play and create as well as capture and share this unique historic moment seems to be providing participants the feeling of a common shelter from otherwise tough and complex reality.”

Pejac says he’s heartened to see so many great results shared to Instagram, and they just keep on coming. Best known for his stunning interactive outdoor art, which ranges from small painted scenes to sculptural installations on public walls, he’s inspired street artists around the world to examine their surroundings for opportunities to express their creativity.

“When talking about Pejac, the key terms are ‘message’ and ‘adaptation,'” reads the artist’s bio. “No matter if he works on paper, canvas, or in public, he has tremendous ability to adapt his work in order to pass a clear and powerful message. Whether drawing a map of the world draining into a sewer or painting a chilling take on an iconic photograph of a Buddhist monk burning himself, his art is provocative and critical, capable of stopping the observer in his tracks. In order to achieve such effect, he [uses] different visual languages, reaching for unconventional tools or finding alternative ways to present the finished work.”

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More than 1,000 New Yorkers came together to be photographed by the French artist for “The Chronicles of New York City,” a collaboration with architecture firm LOT-EK, who designed the stack of shipping containers hosting the mural in Williamsburg’s Domino Park. The mural is a compilation of images collaged together into an urban scene and reproduced on a tremendous scale. Overlooking the East River, it draws people into the newly completed park to engage with it via a smartphone app.

The Brooklyn Museum’s description of the artwork reads: “This soaring multimedia installation traces JR’s career from his early documentation of graffiti artists as a teenager in Paris to his large-scale architectural interventions in cities worldwide to his more recent digitally collaged murals that create collective portraits of diverse publics. The centerpiece of the exhibition is ‘The Chronicles of New York City,’ a new epic mural of more than 1,000 New Yorkers that is accompanied by audio recordings of each person’s story.”

“All of the projects on view honor the voices of everyday people and demonstrate JR’s ongoing commitment to community, collaboration, and civic discourse. Working at the intersections of photography, social engagement, and street art, JR collaborates with communities by taking individual portraits, reproducing them at a monumental scale, and wheat pasting them — sometimes illegally — in nearby public spaces.”

“The Chronicles of New York City” is the final work crowning the exhibition “JR: Chronicles,” the first major North American exhibition the artist’s works, which officially opened in October 2019. Set at the Brooklyn Museum, the show features murals, photographs, videos, films, dioramas, and archival materials spanning JR’s entire two-decade career.

You can also view close-ups of the Williamsburg mural itself, getting a better look at both the individuals featured in it and how the imagery was assembled. Some of the portraits are tucked into windows, or peeking out from the basement level of the brick building. Other subjects are dancing, performing stunts, or playing music. And it’s loads of fun to pick out humorous little details, like a group of people using extra-long straws to drink from soda bottles on a lower floor.

“JR: Chronicles” will be on view until May 3rd, 2020. Other murals can be seen at the Kings Theater in Flatbush and the Brooklyn Academy of Global Finance in Bedford-Stuyvesant, with even more set to appear through the run of the exhibition.

Check out more of JR’s work, including a giant optical illusion mural outside the Louvre Museum in Paris and a poignant US-Mexico border art installation featuring a Latino child peering over the wall. The latter was created as a response to President Trump’s attacks on DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program), which protects people who were brought illegally to the United States as minors from deportation.

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A new exhibition called Urban Miniatures takes the kind of street art you’ll commonly find in places like London, New York City, Lisbon, and São Paulo and literally shrinks it down. The curators took a Hornby train set and a collection of tiny (like, really tiny, not shed-tiny) houses, and asked a lineup of 40 well-known international graffiti, urban, and contemporary artists to customize each piece, producing “a subversive model city.”

Needless to say, this isn’t your average miniature Christmas village or museum diorama. Each diminutive work bears the tell-tale stamps of the artist who customized it, and if you’re familiar with street art, you’ll recognize some right away. There’s an optical illusion mural from Peeta, black-and-white wheat pasting by DONK, and abstract geometry by Mark McClure.

There’s something really fun about zooming in to examine a high-rise or bodega that can fit in the palm of your hand and taking in all of the practically microscopic details, like graffiti tags, trash, the weathered edges of an old sign, and the texture of the tiniest cobblestone wall. The train cars are especially cool, including an NCB freight car customized by TinyScenic to include a swimming pool, floats, lounge chair, and palm tree. Plus, the train set actually runs along its tracks at the show.

The full roster of artists also includes Adam Bridgland, Ange Bell, Art+Believe, Ben Allen, Ben Frost, Candice Tripp, Carl Cashman, Chum101, Cosmo Sarson, Dave Buonaguuidi, David Bray Frea Buckler, Jerome White, Jo Peel, Maxim, Katrina Russell-Adams, Louis O’Haara, Louis Masai, Pure Evil, Regman, SheOne, Shuby, Static, Tim Fowler, Tinsel Edwards, Victoria Homewood, Will Barras, Zevs, and many, many others.

You can see the Urban Miniatures show in person now through December 22nd, 2019 as part of the Artists Open Houses Christmas Festival in Brighton, England, or check out featured works on Instagram. To support individual participating artists, check out the PaxtonGlew online store, which includes limited edition prints, models, and more.

PaxtonGlew consists of duo Emily Paxton, a photographer, educator, and creative, and Pam Glew, an international textile artist. This show marks their curatorial debut.

The duo’s official website notes: “Emily and Pam met in 2004 in Brighton, where they worked as Photography and Art technicians. Since then they have remained good friends, worked as educators, started families, and continued their creative careers. Emily is a freelance photographer and lecturer who has curated pop-up exhibitions and taught numerous people their way around a camera. Pam has exhibited internationally as a textile artist and has been commissioned by brands including Armani, Ralph Lauren, and Microsoft.”

The post Urban Miniatures: Street Artists Turn a Gallery into a Diorama first appeared on Dornob.

Okuda San Miguel continues his career of taking street art to new heights with “Kaos Temple,” a remarkable renovation that transformed the chapel into a sanctuary for skateboarders. The original structure, designed by architect Manuel del Busto and built in 1912, was in rough shape, falling apart after many years of neglect.

Collaborating with the Church Brigade skate group and sponsor Red Bull, San Miguel got to work on the rainbow-colored project, painting the walls, vault, and glasswork in his distinctive geometric style. Taking inspiration from pop surrealism and traditional indigenous art, San Miguel often paints animals and faces, saying he likes using a wide variety of bright colors for his portraits to symbolize multiculturalism.

The artist didn’t start with any preconceived ideas when he first started planning the design for this project. Kaos Temple came together almost by intuition. San Miguel simply went inside and allowed his imagination to fill in the blanks, using the architecture itself as a guide. For large specs like this, he typically starts with a latex primer and spray paints over it. He likes using spray paint because it’s a forgiving method, allowing him to quickly correct mistakes — or decide he likes them enough to keep them.

The name of the project comes from San Miguel’s own “Kaos Star,” a large three-dimensional metal sculpture with many points. A crowdfunding campaign helped the project come to life, and it remains one of the artist’s largest and most impressive works. Skaters travel from all over the world to experience this highly unique indoor skate park.

If you ever get a chance to see it in person, it would be highly worth your while to spend as much time as you can just taking in all of the details. You’ll spot many of San Miguel’s favorite motifs, including skulls, owls, monkeys, bulls, dogs, eyes, nude figures, and of course, the multi-pointed star.

The artist describes this abandoned-church-turned-skate-park as “a magical and alluring work” that represents a creative expression of cultural vibrancy to promote new arts spaces. He’s certainly earned the attention of the public, and it would be cool to see more projects in this vein — whether from San Miguel himself or from other artists he has inspired.

“I need to create in order to be happy and to feel good,” he said in a 2016 interview with Fluoro. “Art is the meaning of my life. When I am working on the lift in a big building and see the movement of the cars and people in the streets, I feel freedom and alive. I am out of the mechanic capitalist world, closer to the sky.”

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Banksy has surprised us all yet again, which is ironically pretty unsurprising. The artist has opened a bold and outlandish homeware store, featuring pieces like a Tony the Tiger pelt rug just inches away from a bowl of spilled Frosted Flakes and a baby mobile decorated with video cameras instead of baby ducklings or unicorns. But the real kicker? No one can get into it.

The enigmatic artist’s new store, Gross Domestic Product, popped up in Croydon, London around the beginning of October, staying there for just two weeks after first appearing. A flyer for the store branded with the clever slogan “When art irritates life” explains that this will be the first and only Gross Domestic Product store, and that it’ll act solely as a showroom for display purposes. Though no one can enter the store, customers can now purchase the decorations via an accompanying online shop.

Banksy was inspired to create GDP by “possibly the least poetic reason to ever make some art” — namely, an argument over trademarking law and the right to the name “Banksy.” A greeting card company is contesting the artist’s trademark of his own name in order to take possession of it and then legally sell his trademarked products. As the law currently stands, Banksy may not have a right to his trademark if he does not use it himself. The artist refused to go down without a fight, and is using this new showroom to exhibit both an exciting new art installation and impressive, proactive legal action.

The store is comprised of multiple rooms, each of which is quite unique from the rest. One room, almost completely dark, is lit solely from a disco ball made from a police officer’s helmet. This room houses an eclectic collection of other art pieces, including a gravestone and a large crucifix.

Another room shows wares more likely to be on sale, including a hand-stitched welcome mat and plates and mugs featuring some of his most iconic paintings. In this same room, a large screen displays a mural Banksy created in 2018 of a child sticking his tongue out like he would to taste snowflakes, when in reality it’s ash coming from a nearby pollutant. A frame above states, “crisis as usual.”

Still, the most striking room Gross Domestic Product has to offer is the parlor room with the aforementioned Tony the Tiger rug. In here, Tony’s teeth appear rotten from the sugary cereal. The blood red walls are decorated with a version of Banksy’s Rage, Flower Thrower, as well as stuffed animal head mounts riddled with garbage.

While we don’t have all the details on pricing just yet (not all of the products are currently available), we know that some items start as low as £10. The project also shows an immense effort in sustainability, as all the home goods have been made with as many existing or recycled products as possible. Additionally, they are all handcrafted within the UK.

Some products might be a little too avant-garde for actual purchase, unless you want your little one sleeping and dreaming under ten security cameras, of course. Other items, such as the decorative pillows with quippy sayings, could easily fit into any home. And love it or hate it, there’s no denying that Banksy definitely has something unique and interesting to say with this new line.

Let’s be honest, we didn’t want to have to deal with parking or waiting in line anyways. Happy online shopping!

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