It’s been a while since Ron English was last in London hasn’t it? He’s back at the Lazarides Gallery on Rathbone Place with a new exhibition titled, ready for it, “Skin Deep: Post-Instinctual Afterthoughts On Psychological Portraiture”

Faile and Bast will be taking over London’s Lazarides Gallery on Greek Street from February 12. Faile and Bast fans can expect an experienced based on 1980s popular culture. Faile works will be on sale, starting from a measley £2!

Faile will also be mounting a retrospective exhibition at Lazarides Rathbone space.

We’ve got some tasty teaser images from none other than Wallkandy. As ever, thanks for the heads up on these!

Photos courtesy of Wallkandy. You can peep a stunning set of photos from a studio visit aswell

Open 3rd July 2009 – 6th August 2009
Lazarides Gallery,
Rathbone Place,
London

www.lazinc.com

This is going up right now as I am typing this and we’ve got a whole host of shots of the amazing work that JR and his team are putting up. He opens his brand new solo shows on 3rd October at both Laz on Charing X Road and Laz on Greek St. More on these later…

Typical of the man, he’s working on a HUGE scale (as always) and is covering almost all of the side of Foyles bookshop on Manette St just off the Charing X Road. With pieces on the opposite building and the whole front of the other building and a stunning piece on the side, this is whetting the appetite for what could be amazing shows come the 3rd.

Full gallery after the jump..

Lazarides are currently dominating the UK street art gallery scene and they’ve decided it’s about time they head over the Atlantic and start owning stateside.

They’re going to be opening a pop-up show in New York’s Bowery and will be bringing together their artists in a unique show of some very lively work.

“The Outsiders” will open on the 26th September and run through till 12th October. The show will feature works from Faile, Paul Insect, JR, Antony Micallef, Jonathan Yeo, Miranda Donovan, Invader, David Choe, Mark Jenkins, Todd James, Vhils, Polly Morgan, Mode 2, BAST, Conor Harrington and Zevs.

“Lazarides promises to cut to the core of the Big Apple. Antony Micallef will show his huge Times Square piece (illustrated) and Faile, JR and Blu, whose huge graphic murals adorned Tate Modern will show alongside Jonathan Yeo’s porno portrait of the US President. Zevs will perform using his unique liquidated logo on a very different kind of naked canvas. Invader, famous for leaving cubic aliens around the planet, will be revealing his most ambitious psychogeography to date, and another secret work will provide a certain famous lady with some much needed funding for her forthcoming presidential campaign.”

As you can see from the Conor Harrington piece above, it’s going to be a stellar lineup and definitely a must see event if you’re in the area. Just a shame we can’t go!

Lazarides Gallery New York
282 Bowery at Houston
New York City
New York 10012
Hours: 11am-7pm
Admission: Free

We headed down to the opening of the new Paul Insect show tonight in Kings X. Tucked away at no. 9 Caledonian Road, the venue was once a Turkish baths, then a “Book” shop (sex shop) and then a photography studio, it was opened up to house some fantastic work from this sterling artist.

Once again, Laz, and Paul Insect have pulled out all the stops and put together an absolutely stunning show, which made excellent use of the space.

We’ve put together a gallery of some select images after the jump, but for those of you who can make it down we definitely recommend a visit.

Photography by Paul Jenkins

Lazarides Gallery are gearing up to present “Poison”, a major nine-day site-specific exhibition of new work by Paul Insect in an out of gallery location – a former bath house in King’s Cross.

At odds with the location and in contrast with the contrived health and voluptuousness of the classic Playboy bunny, twelve skeletal bunny girls are the stars of this show. Luridly coloured with a metallic paint (like Miss August above) the bronze sculptures, entitled ‘Playmates’, reveal Insect’s concern to pick over and appropriate the visual vocabulary of popular culture, and subvert it with a satirist’s eye. The ‘Playmates’ presented in this exhibition are hardly the fantasy calendar girls of our collective dreams but instead offer a savage and witty comment on sexuality in the consumer age. As our heroines sport kitsch memorabilia (including Heffner-esque bunny ears and a cast of the fangs worn by Udo Kier in Andy Warhol’s cult 1974 film Blood for Dracula), and adopt sometimes less-than-ladylike poses, they show how the margins of exploitation and erotica, sex and death, can become intriguingly blurred.

The exact location of the new exhibition will be revealed on 11th September on the Laz website.

We’ll also have a gallery and interview coming very soon, so watch this space

Todd James aka REAS will be presenting an exhibition of new work entitled “Blood & Treasure” at the Laz Gallery on Greek Street on the 29th August.

James is an internationally recognised artist who was a co-creator of the seminal Street Market exhibition at Deitch Projects in New York, which was selected for the Venice Biennale in 2001. James’ work has also been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Tate Museum in Liverpool, the Parco gallery in Tokyo, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco

Laz go onto explain that:

Protest images marked out in cartoon outrage, filled with recycled advertising cast-offs and corrupted child scrawls, these large-scale works of gouache and graphite smash the distance between death and jokes and between the viewer and what he or she probably goes around trying not to know about the present state of things.

Head down to the gallery on the 29th to get an insight into an artist who takes his work seriously but through cartoons!

We hit the private view of the new Ben Turnbull show at the Laz Inc Gallery on Greek Street and it was a veritable feast for the eyes. Gallery after the jump.

As we continue to build on the previous two interviews, UK Street Art had the opportunity to interview another of the rising stars in the urban art scene. This time it was Miranda Donovan, who will run you through her influences, why she chose 3D as a medium for her work and what’s next for her.

Check out the interview after the jump

If we start from the beginning, what would be your earliest influences on how you got in to the artform and where you are today?

As a child I loved colouring books and cartoon characters. Garbage Pail Kid stickers were a particular obsession of mine because of the hundreds of different characters, names and colours.  If I was given pocket money it would go on buying another pack of these stickers or comics.  When I was 6 I remember being given 5 pounds and making the enormous decision to spend the whole lot on a box!  I loved buying The Beano and Dandy and later on I enjoyed looking at the different characters in Viz.  I often didn’t care what the stories were about but simply enjoyed looking at the characters because of their form and colour.

I had a classical background with a History of Art degree.  I was particularly drawn to the works of the German Expressionists, specifically the Die Brucke group, because their work is vivid in colour, communicates emotional tension and draws on Primitivism.  Graffiti too is vivid in colour, enables someone to leave their mark in society so holds an emotional value whilst it could also be regarded as quite a primitive and childlike thing to do if seen as vandalism.  I then lived near Marseille where graffiti had its first major impact on me.

How did you become interested in graffiti and what’s your reason for taking it off the street and into the gallery?

Graffiti first started to enter my conscious whilst living down in the South of France outside Marseille. You can’t fail to notice it.   It’s everywhere.  I got to know a graffitist down there who amusingly worked for the mayor by day and tagged at night, but it wasn’t until I returned to London that my obsession with graffiti begun.  Whenever I passed the Lucozade building that used to be on the A4 flyover (it was pulled down about 4 years ago now) I had this desire to paint it.  So I did and realized it was the graffiti pulling me in.  My reason for taking graffiti off the street and into the gallery began as something very subconscious.

You’re half Dutch – does this come into your work in any form?

Yes.  Recently work by the Dutch 17th Century Landscape painters:  Jacob Van Ruisdael and Jan Van Goyen have been of great inspiration.  The immense skies and low-lying land so pertinent to Holland and so apparent in the work of the aforementioned artists is something I have a great affiliation with whilst at the same time this division of space has become an integral part of my work in that the brick “walls’ are the immense skies and the low lying land is the pavement or scrubland.

And who do you see as modern influences?

When it comes to the sculptural element in my work artists such as Antoni Tapies and Anselm Keifer are of particular influence to me.  I would say 80% of graffiti I see on city streets and in rural settings inspires and influences me.

Why did you decide to work in 3D – what’s different from this instead of working 2D, and do you think it does really add more “dimension” so to speak to your work?

I decided to work in 3D because of a desire to create something that looked very real without being photographic.

In addition when I see graffiti it isn’t only graffiti that arouses me but also the texture and tactility of the surface on which it is found.  In my opinion the surface and immediate surroundings wherein graffiti is found contribute an enormous sense of character.  A wall has a story of its own communicated through the “type” of wall it is ie what the bricks look like: clean cut bricks; crumbling bricks, smooth bricks etc what the overall appearance of the wall is; does it have cracks, crevices, fading weathered colours and so on that have appeared over time.  By building up a 3D “brick wall” scene my intention is to communicate to the viewer the beauty of mark making on a textured surface that, in my opinion, is so much a part of the graffiti and in so doing makes the viewer conscious of the beauty and power of graffiti as opposed to something that can be disregarded as pure vandalism.

Building a sculptural 3D surface creates something very tactile, which in itself often draws the viewer in and evokes within the viewer a desire to touch.  When I look at something 2D, ie a painting it is rare that I have a desire to touch it whilst a 3D object instinctively makes me want to reach forward touch it and run my hands over it.   As such an aim of mine is to draw the viewer in by evoking two senses: sight and touch so adding an extra dimension to the work.

I know that you started your work by the exploration of “types” of housing, and you’ve now moved on to the study of specifics within architecture – what caused the decision to make this shift?

At the time this was a subconscious decision.  In retrospect however I wanted to re-challenge myself.  Having explored a multitude of housing and building “types” from Canary Wharf, to Council blocks and Shanty Towns it seemed a natural progression to focus on the specifics in architecture.  Whilst I wanted to move my work forward in new directions I also wanted to retain the structural elements of architecture.  The linear, grid like characteristics of architecture, also seen in brick walls, give a sense of order in contrast to the anarchical characteristics of grafiiti, which pose a threat to this order.

How does your work blur the boundaries between object, sculpture and painting?

The first process of my work is creating or “building” a textured surface into which I carve the bricks and sculpt various architectural elements and onto which I will then paint.  Whilst I “build” this highly textured surface onto the flat 2d surface of the support I also “build” it around the sides of the support giving the piece a sculptural appearance. On completion the works are framed in Perspex boxes.  This adds a further dimension.  The pieces become jewel like objects, something to be looked at but not touched, protected.  Framed in this way the smaller pieces can be free standing, like a sculpture but can also be hung flat against a wall like a painting.  The boundaries are blurred because the pieces are neither one set thing nor the other but have characteristics of an object, sculpture and painting without being one set thing.

Do you think your sculpture work is a statement about the environment we live in? And do you make everything from scratch; the smallest detail upwards?

Yes “building” walls definitely makes a statement about our environment.  Not only have we witnessed a recent building boom but the erection of new buildings, houses, city walls etc is something that has taken place continuously throughout history.

And yes each work is “built” from scratch from the smallest detail upwards.

Do you make commentary on London through your work?

Whilst some works are a commentary on London I would argue that as a whole my work presents a world of paradoxes specific to society in general.  The more serious works that focus on gang stabbings and shootings raise questions about a social problem ever present in London but other cities such as Glasgow too.  The big brother “eye” watches us not just in London but even in a scrubland.   The capitalist Tesco takeover is not just becoming an eyesore on many London streets but is also ruining rural settings at a rapid pace.  The pieces more specific to London are arguably the more ironical and lighthearted: tagging prestigious London landmarks impervious to vandalism in real life, presenting Al Fayed’s big department store as a big shop of “horrors”, using one of the most famous streets in London; “Shaftesbury Avenue” as a tool to communicate a view that “all the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players”.

As the graffiti/street art scene keeps evolving, do you see it taking a step in the direction of where you are at now; creating not only 2d markings on surfaces, but also creating the surfaces they go on – do you think a whole space will become an “installation” rather than a gallery with paintings/prints hanging on the walls?

In many respects I think this is already happening.  Take the Cans Festival.  Graffiti artists weren’t just putting their pieces on walls but installed smashed up, burnout cars that were covered in graffiti and furniture too.  The tunnel where the festival took place became an outdoor gallery where people had to queue to see the work.

I think your work is comedic, is this a conscious thing? Why is this your intention?

Yes there is a consciously comical element to some of my work.  I think there is a massive amusement factor to graffiti.  Take Banksy. His work is full of wit and humour and certainly puts a smile on many a face.  He outwits the authorities.  And people, I believe, feel an affiliation with rebellion.  If we’re always being told what to do and continuously being watched it is human nature to retaliate.  If you’re told you’re not allowed to do something is it not fun to go and do that exact thing?  Imagine the faces and reactions of those that live in affluent parts of town or politicians arriving at the Houses of Parliament to find their worlds have become a canvas for graffiti.

How do you feel about being a woman in the scene – do you think it’s male dominated, and if so, is that an issue?

In all honesty this is something I have never given much thought to.  I know it is a male dominated scene but I don’t have an issue with that.  On the contrary I almost relish being in the minority.

Where do you see the street art/graffiti scene going – do you think it’s becoming too mainstream, or do you believe that the work that all the galleries are doing are helping to further the development of it? Or do you think there are quite a few people jumping on the bandwagon?

There’s no doubt the street art/graffiti scene is becoming more mainstream.  It is used in everything from advertising to shoe designs.  In this respect I do feel big corporate companies are jumping on the artist bandwagon.  However bringing street art/graffiti work, created by the artists themselves, into the gallery is the only way forward.  Graffiti/Street Art is the landscape of the 21st Century.  In addition everyone can understand it because it is a part of their existence today.  There is no elitism attached to it.  You don’t have to have done an Art Degree to understand it.  Yes it is probably true to say that “real” street art will always be produced in illegal places on the street itself.  However I think the fact that it is being recognized as an art form rather than as vandalism is a good thing.  The recent graffiti project that took place at Tate Modern is a massive positive step forward because graffiti is the most relevant art form today.  People like Blek Le Rat and Banksy have views that deserve to be listened to.  Plus graffiti art should be regarded as the murals or frescoes of the 21st century. Murals date back to prehistoric times and frescoes were outdoor egg tempera paintings that were a huge part of the early Italian Renaissance. In my opinion graffiti is comparable.  I wouldn’t be surprised if in time more and more people commission graffitists to do pieces on their houses just as patrons commissioned artists during the Italian Renaissance to paint frescoes.

How do you see yourself differing from the other artists in the same field – do you even place yourself alongside the likes of Banksy, Faile, Micallef etc?

The most immediate difference to the artists mentioned above is that I do the majority of my work in the studio rather than on the street.  In this respect I don’t place myself alongside them.

What’s next for you – where do you see yourself going in the future?

The second Album!

www.lazinc.com