Francesca Gavin
Laurence King Publishing
Everyone has seen graffiti, from the tag on the street sign down your road to the pieces on high-rise buildings you’ve looked out on whilst getting the train into the city. But this book takes it that one step further, delving into the world of those artists who wanted to move away from the 2-D world of graffiti and take a step into new materials. This book showcases the brilliant artists who have produced some of the most original and eye-catching art around.
Cut Up are a fine example of using what’s around you to make art. The collective cut up [unsurprisingly] posters from billboards and proceed to re-arrange them into their own pictures. This might not sound like it’s likely to be that exciting, but when you see the results, with the angry youth being the prime example, you’ll have the breath taken away from you.
Eine is perhaps the most well known artist in the book, an artist known to everyone in London for his colourful giant letters which adorn shutters of shops all over the city. The giant letters are said to have turned the city into “one big sentence” with the artist saying:
“I’ve always vandalized things, I never thought it was a particularly bad thing to do.”
The Graffiti Research Lab, which has been labelled as “geek graffiti” takes a medium we know well, tagging, and adds that little bit something extra which is guaranteed to make it stand out. They use LEDS, balloon bombing and, perhaps the most well known of all their work, laser projectors. With these projectors they are able to write their groggy tag on many famous landmarks, including the Arc De Triomphe.
Three other fine examples used in this book are Invader, who puts his mosaic characters all over the world; Mark Jenkins whose incredible Embed collection makes people believe the art is actually a real person with their head embedded into a wall and Slinkachu, famous for putting his tiny people in huge settings.
The examples picked out above are just a fraction of the brilliant work in this book, with beautiful colour photos which give you an idea of the detail in the work and the environment they find themselves in. Street Art is often said to not have any boundaries and if ever there was a book to showcase this, it’s Street Renegades.
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