Alias Arts

Banksy has at least six pieces in San Francisco now – thanks again to Warholian.com for the use of their pictures. These photos show both the pieces and their context which as always shows up some really relevant placement. Warholian’s Flickr stream has all the exact locations for those in town.

All San Francisco Banksy pictures – Warholian.com

The latest copy of VNA  (verynearlyalmost) landed on the doormat this morning with a reassuring thud. Sure enough its another 100 pages of quality content with the usual great pictorial roundups of graffiti, tags, stickers, stencils and paste ups. There’s also features on Insa (the cover shoot looks like fun!), Gaia, Maclaim’s Case, Mike Giant, The Toasters ‘Bluff Buff’ work and Joe Holbrook. For me though the standout piece has to be the Ruedi One interview with some awesome photos from eerily quiet night time graffiti raids into Europe’s railway yards. Four pounds – get it here.

VNA issue 11 – (image from VNA’s flickr)

Ruedi One in VNA 11 (image VNA’s flickr)

Hot on the heels of his work in L.A. (coinciding with the Stateside release of Exit Through The Gift Shop film) further new Banksy work has now appeared in San Francisco. Warholian were pretty much first up with the news and kindly sent these pictures through to be used on artofthestate. Since then several other pieces have appeared – you can find them here and here and what looks like a joined up one between here and here.

Banksy in San Francisco

As both hoped for and expected Roa has been hitting the streets of London with massive new works to coincide with his show at the Pure Evil Gallery. I tracked down a couple of the most recent ones today which were lit up by the fantastic sunshine we’ve had pretty much all week. If you want to find some of Roa’s pieces for yourself try this map from Pure Evil.

Escif’s show opens at Pictures On Walls on Friday (16th April) evening between 6 – 9pm . Prior to the opening work from the Spanish artist has gone up on the shutters outside the pictureonwalls ground floor premises at 46-48 Commercial Street, London, E1 6LT and in the Dray Walk car park off Brick Lane.

Different Ways To Escape From The Tragedy!!

If you’ve seen Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop or even just the new extended trailer for the film you’ll have seen one of the funniest moments – graffiti artist Escif getting arrested in quite ridulculous head gear while painting a wall. Other (slightly more calm) moments can be seen on his youtube channel which can be found here. The good news is that he’s still at large and Pictures On Walls are shortly bringing him over from Spain for a solo show (‘Around The Wall’) at their Commercial Street premises in Aldgate. The event runs from 17th April to the 30th April (check on picturesonwalls.com for the latest updates on particular opening times). In the meantime I’m hoping to see him hitting the streets of London with some quality interventions such as this:

Escif (image courtesy picturesonwalls)

Escif on Youtube

Roa’s work translates easily from the streets to a gallery setting and this show in the small but perfectly formed Pure Evil Gallery in Shoreditch is one of the finest I’ve seen in a long time. Featuring a pretty unique interactive element many of the artworks can be flipped open or closed to reveal the different states of their animals decay or their vital organs. And with a cleverly layed out range of site specific works, art pieces for sale and a room full of photos of his work in situ the space it’s a show that London really needs right now to give it a much needed shot of originality. Here’s hoping that originality transfers itself to the streets as well before Roa leaves town….  

Over the past year Roa has been, in my humble opinion, smashing it worldwide. So its great to see that he has his first solo show in London opening on Thursday night (April 8th) at the Pure Evil Gallery.

Roa in London:

So the elections been called and we get to choose between two brands of basically the same washing powder.

Of course other parties are available but short of a hung Parliament there’s no chance they will wield any real power.

Here’s Dr D taking on the UK Independence Party by hi-jacking one of their posters alongside the M4 heading into London. Nice work – especially as it links UKIP, Robert Kilroy Silk and that classic graffiti slogan ‘Kilroy Woz ’Ere’ all into one billboard. More on this piece here.

Before

After