Icons For Now
Various Artists
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Icons for Now shows 10 of the most significant and innovative names on the Danish and international street art scene from the last three decades. These artists have been invited to produce work in dialogue with the city of Århus – it’s architecture and it’s inhabitants.
With the names André alias Monsieur A (FR), Blu (IT), Faust (DK), Herbert Baglione (BR), HuskMitNavn (DK), MissTic (FR), Steve Powers (US), Søren Behncke alias papfar (DK), Victor Ash (P/FR/DK) and Zevs (FR), this exhibition presents a wide selection of some of the most brilliant artists to have come from this scene.
Street art has become an intricate part of urban environments and everyday lives of our time. In contemporary urban space, which is dominated by commercial and informative images and signals, street art becomes a necessary alternative as well as a competing world of signs, its expression ranging from the aesthetically seductive to the thought provoking and challenging. The intentions behind the works of these artists vary from the desire to transform ordinary places into beautiful environments, to making humoristic statements, social criticism and direct confrontation.
The term ”street art” was first use to describe a number of artists in New York in the 1980’ies, out of whom Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat are the most famous today. Although these artists were both inspired by spray can art, their expression and strategies were different and appealed to a wider audience. Today the term is also used as an umbrella term, which covers various unauthorized interventions at street level, among these - graffiti. Most of the artists participating in Icons for Now share a past as ’writers’ or graffiti painters, still some of them rely on other sources of inspiration and some of them have a background in political activism and graphic design. Their talent for creating attention-grabbing works that have an immediate on passers by effect unites them. Additionally none of them have relied on being pushed forward in their career by a network of established art schools, art institutions, art critics, curators or galleries. Initially they became recognized through alternative art magazines, specialized homepages and galleries but especially through the audience in the street.
Street art is fleeting, a transitory phenomena in flux, because it arises and disappears in modern urban environments here and now.
Since street art appeared in Philadelphia in the 1960’ies and spread to New York in the 1970’s and to the rest of the world from the beginning of the 1980’ies, the fight against graffiti has developed along side it. But anti-graffiti campaigns have not been able to guaranty cities void of un-authorized writing and images on its walls. Quite the contrary, anti-graffiti politics have inspired street artists including the participants in Icons for Now to reconsider their praxis, especially concerning their choice of materials and methods.
HuskMitNavn has exchanged his spray can with more impermanent posters, which are thought to do less damage to urban environments. Zevs has moved on from using spray can paint to using strong durable road paint which is impossible to wash off. Steve Powers has worked on some of the most neglected and decayed surfaces of the city, and thereby promoted graffiti as local renovation work. André has offered graffiti as a service to lovers, who wanted to express their love of their partner, publicly. Søren Behncke has right from the outset, under the alias papfar (‘cardboard daddy’) chosen to use cardboard which is as easy to put up in the city space as it is to take down again. Miss.Tic and Faust have applied for permission to do what they do anyway. Herbert Baglione and André have been assigned to do large decorative works and Victor Ash and Blu have both done large murals for exhibitions in public spaces and at art centres.
Icons for Now, presents the legal contributions of ten artists within the urban space of Århus. With an established institution behind them, the artists have been given the opportunity to spend more time creating their works than they are probably used to expect, and the works will be more permanent than what is usually the case within this scene. Consequently the works, which make up Icons for Now will be preserved and “iconized for a period of time - where after they be given over to the city indefinitely. They are “for Now”- because they make a mark in an age which is fleeting by nature.
Icons for Now will set a different framework for street artists, their audience and the city in general. Often these artists are invited indoors because they have become recognized artists. We pull them outside again. By doing this Icons for Now presents these artists in their natural environment, however natural that might be. Icons for Now should partake in both sharpening the eye, and qualifying opinions towards that which these artists, and their contemporaries, are capable of. In a city space which is strictly administered what is needed is not more design, more signs and more billboards, but thought provoking pauses that make an impact.
Miriam Nielsen & Toke Lykkeberg
The exhibition is curated by Miriam Nielsen and Toke Lykkeberg and is the result of a collaboration between The Aarhus Art Building and the Aarhus Festival. The exhibition is sponsored by the Cultural Development Foundation, the Municipality of Aarhus, the Danish Arts Council’s Committee for Visual Arts, Diesel, Colorama, All Remove and the Nordea Danmark Fund.