I had the great pleasure of being able to accompany and photograph Arturo Bordalo aka BORDALO II, who wrote the foreword to my blockbuster book „icons of street art- the big mural book“, during the creation of his latest work.
As part of the Calle Libre Festival in Vienna, which has been taking place for 9 years, the organizers around Jakob Kattner succeeded in bringing the famous street art artist BORDALO II to Vienna
His animal of choice this time is a squirrel that is common in the surrounding woods.
The preparatory work for this took place in his studio in Lisbon. The resulting work was sent to Vienna by container and stored there until the beginning of the Calle Libre Festival 2022.
In a 2-day marathon, the squirrel was fine-tuned with plastic scrap from the area and anchored by BORDALO II and his two buddies JOAO and MATEUS on the wall of an old warehouse in the Nordwestbahnstrasse in the 2nd district of Vienna.
You can follow the creation of this masterpiece almost live in my documentation of the Making – Off.
The work itself can be admired in the abandoned freight forwarding area of the Nordwestbahnhof in Nordwestbahnstraße together with works by other international artists.
Off to the great metropolis on the Danube for street art hunting.
2 years have passed since the publication of „Icons of Street Art – The Big Murals“ and at the same time it was almost 2 years of a pandemic that still holds us in suspense and has made travel difficult or even impossible. International festivals as well as street art hunting had become impracticable. It was also two years in which the book was a resounding success and gave so many street art aficionados great pleasure. According to the publisher, the first edition sold extremely well and is sold out in the meantime despite lockdowns and largely closed bookshops.
The press echo was overwhelming and the Amazon charts for graffiti and street art books, in which the “Icons” book spent almost 18 months in the top 10, testify to the love for this – some already say: a classic of the Big Mural scene – book .
All this and above all about the sensational support from, among others, “i support street art” and also the artist via Facebook, Instagram, I am also happy as a photographer and documentary keeper of these great big murals.
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I would also like to thank the initiators of the festivals, the galleries, who act as initiators of various walls, for the joy of being able to see all of this, and above all those who are responsible for the beauty of this art, the artists.
That is why I have selected a series of original photos for all of you, which I took for the “Icons” book and which should be representative of the artists and the work.
I wish you all a good time, stay healthy and keep yourselves happy.
Back from the azores we spent some fantastic days in Lisbon, the city we love so much.
Weeks earlier a Lisbon based friend sent us the announcement for the “muro festival” 2021 and so we were very curious to see the new works of urban art.
The 4 th edition of “MURO Festival de Arte Urbana LX 2021”, organized by the Lisbon City Hall in co-production with Junta de Freguesia do Parque das Nacoes and Gebalis, brought more than 30 national and foreign artist, that individually or collectively, created 24 urban art interventions at Parque das Nacoes.
So we had an amazing day with a scavenger hunt for the new works. Google maps was in great demand and my wife suzan was also challenged as my co-pilot. But at the end of the day, thanks in part to a good dose of patience, we found almost all of them.
As is so often the case, these locally run festivals take visitors to districts that are not listed in travel guides or on city walks, but which say a lot about the true life in a big city like Lisbon. On the trail of urban art, the visitor gets to know cities much more intensively.
On the way back to the city, it`s also worth taking a detour to Marvila, another suburb, with it´s unbelievably large murals and then definitely choose one of the wonderful cervejarias like Ramiro for a cold Sagres beer and some seafood.
Fantastic, enjoy and enjoy also our collection of artists, in alphabetical order BORDALO II- coletivo rua- D´Face- IAmEelco- Jaqueline de Montaigne- Juan Jose Surace- Mabel Vincentef- Mikolaj Rejs- Pedro Podre- Rocket01- Stom 500
MURO_LX FESTIVAL
MURO_LX is the Lisbon Urban Art Festival, developed by the Urban Art Gallery (GAU), the core of the Department of Cultural Heritage Council.The festival was created in 2016 with the main purpose to promote Urban Art in Lisbon, through creation and production of new works in public space, promoting its authors, national and foreign.
With each edition, MURO_LX intervenes in a single parish of the city, providing the discovery of a new territory through art.Over the course of 4 editions, MURO_LX exibited more than two hundred urban artists, national and foreign, produced about one hundred and fifty new pieces of urban art. Lisbon is nowadays recognized as a reference in the international circuits of Urban Art, and MURO_LX is one of the projects that most contributes to this success. Lisbon is once again the stage of Muro, Urban Art Festival. In this 4th edition, urban art occupies Parque das Nações, the easternmost part of Lisbon city, which was recreated and conquered a new centrality from the cultural and urban project of Expo’98. Urban culture, multiculturalism and sustainability are the themes that inspire more than 30 artists to intervene in a public space, under the motto of the Wall that (re)unite us.
The creative power of urban artists is expressed in MURO LX_2021 through the gathering of different techniques, such as drawing, painting, illustration, graffiti, 3D, design, typography and sculpture, crossing them with the territory and identity of the place where they are inscribed, whether in gables, pedestrian and road crossings, shops, pillars, walls or abandoned spaces.
We love lisbon, have been there so often over the years. Have seen the city rise to become an urban art hot spot and a tourist hot spot as well. We got to know the Portuguese superstars of the scene, VHILS and BORDALO II, whose studio we visited again in summer 2020 and arranged to meet him and his team for lunch.
Lisbon was almost free of tourists this summer, which was incredibly good for the city and and what literally made her breathe a sigh of relief. Long tram rides with the legendary line 28 were once again shared with the locals. No giant cruise ships at the new terminal, on the grounds of Jardim do Tabaco, where the wonderful murals by Pixelpancho and VHILS could still be admired a few years ago.
No badly dressed tourists spat out of the ships who flock en masse up the old alleys of the Alfama to the castle San Jorge. It was again possible to stroll through the city, to linger, to discover new perspectives. We had the luck and the time, after many years , to visit old favorite places like the Hieronymus Monastery in Belem and the Convento do Carmo, the medieval ruin – alone and with a lot of time. We could linger, let the architecture work its magic on us. In the last few years we were put off by the queues that stood in line for hours.
And we had the time with our Lisbon friend Marcial to visit the street art “ Mekkas” Marvila and Quinta do Mocho again. The two satellite towns from the 90 `s accommodate migrants from the former Portuguese colonies, Cap Verdes, Guinea, Angola and Mozambique. The street art projects that were initiated in 2014 and 2017 and are being continued, have fundamentally changed these quarters.
Young people from the quarter offer guided tours, visitors from all over the world come here, crime has fallen and the residents feel proud of their neighborhood. In Marvila, the works reflect the cultural, social artistic influences of the former South American colonies.
Every year, great new works add to the already impressive ensemble. Many of the murals are to find and to admire in our book “Icons of Street Art – Big Murals”, some new ones now in this article.
Lisbon is BORDALO II and VHILS city. Almost on every walk you come across their work, as in many other places in Portugal with its very active urban art scene.
For the new year, Michael Harker has again published four themed calendars in the PHOTOGRAPHICS series, which combine street art from different cities. The large-format calendars from Kunth Verlag for the year 2020 present „women’s power“, „big murals“, „cats“ and „men“
„Women’s power“ unites works au.a. by Vhils, BTOY, Shepard Fairey, Paddy 13 and shows strong women in their most diverse facets, always with great self-image.
Another calendar is dedicated to “men” not only because of equal rights. The men can be found in New York, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin and Vienna. The repertoire ranges from the Beatles to Mimi the Clown to Siegmund Freud.
The largest variant of street art is currently very trendy: murals – huge works of art that take up entire house facades. Unlike classic graffiti, they are legal as commissioned work, but often convey political messages. They represent the spirit of a neighborhood, of an entire city.
Street art favorites have always been cats. As graffiti, tags, throwups, blockbusters… the fourth of the large wall calendars unites wild and tame cats from europe to asia.
