R1. is an active street artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
He has been most active in the last 7 years working extensively with several street art projects in different cities and continents. His work covers various media, including installations, sculptures and wall art (paste ups). In his interventions and sculptures he often works with found materials, transforming them and giving them back to the city, as modified artistic contributions. R1 has lived in England and South Africa in recent years, where he has done most of his work. The work crosses cultural barriers between England and Africa and creates a dialogue between continents.
The Works Of R1.
Street Craft : Yarnbombing, Guerilla Gardening, Light Tagging, Lace Graffiti and More
Street Craft brings together twenty-eight different artists from different countries whose work has redefined what street art can be. By diversifying materials and techniques, Street Craft artists are pushing beyond the two-dimensionality of graffiti and mural-painting, many of them using craft techniques to bring inventive beauty to bland urban surroundings. Tasha Lewis’s blue butterfly swarms decorate derelict corners of Indianapolis and New York, and Mademoiselle Maurice’s origami and lace graffiti beautifies the streets of Paris and Hong Kong. Other artists create sophisticated urban interventions bearing their personal tags, such as the artist SpiderTag, who intertwines sturdy rope and nails to construct abstract graffiti in Madrid, and GorillaLighting, who haunts Berlin’s industrial estates with impermanent projections.
Find the book on Amazon / Thames & Hudson Publishing
Raubdruckerin The Pirate Printer
“Raubdruckerin uses drain covers as a printing module for textiles and paper. By pressing a garment on a drain cover coated with paint, the surface is beeing transfered as a graphical pattern onto the desired object. After first experiments in 2006 Raubdruckerin is meanwhile printing in streets all over the world. Currently the collection shows objects from more than 20 cities.
Every place tells his story through his surfaces. To capture the beauty of their stories, to bring people together by organizing street performances and to sensitize people´s view for the little and seemingly unimportant things in life are the main motivations for this project.”
- via Barto
Mathieu Tremblin’s Legible Graffiti Tags
Mathieu Tremblin‘s 2010 Tag Clouds “rue de Gaillon” project transformed graffiti tags found on the streets into legible new ones.
100 Shutters by MAIN
Mr. MAIN has created a huge graffiti piece, made out of 100 shutters, painted all around in Barcelona.
Check out his project on Instagram.
School House Named After Banksy Receives A Mural
Bridge Farm Primary School in Bristol named one of its houses after the local street artist Banksy, following a student contest to rename some of the school’s buildings after famous people with ties to the city. A few weeks later the school house would receive a brand new original mural and a letter, both signed by Banksy himself.
“Dear Bridge Farm School, thanks for your letter and naming a house after me. Please have a picture, and if you don’t like it, feel free to add stuff. I’m sure the teachers won’t mind. Remember, it’s always easier to get forgiveness than permission. Much love, Banksy.“
The Banksy Job
A heist movie, screwball comedy and documentary all rolled into one big paint splattered ball, The Banksy Job is about art, crime, authentication, ongoing feuds and a famous statue that, when it is reintroduced to the marketplace, could be worth millions.
eL Seed’s Cairo Mural
“Amid Cairo’s brick buildings and heaping piles of trash is a sprawling work of art, which, at first, looks messy and incoherent.
But when you stand on the nearby hillside and read the spray-painted Arabic “calligraffiti,” as its creator Tunisian-French artist eL Seed calls it, the message reads loud and clear : “If one wants to see the light of the sun, he must wipe his eyes.”
The quote represents the importance of withholding judgment of people just because of their circumstances, says eL Seed, who first visited the community a few years ago. He’s called the piece “Perception” for just that reason, hoping to get people to see past the area’s physical appearance.
The entire piece took three weeks to complete, and eL Seed says it was done in total secrecy from the Egyptian government due to the country’s strict laws forbidding artistic expression.”
- via Techinsider.io
C215 Paints Graffiti Tribute For Paris Victims
French stencil artist C215 has become an international icon in the street art scene. Known mostly for his artworks depicting cats or the homeless, he is now paying tribute to the victims of the Paris attacks with a series of graffiti murals.
Blu Buffs His Works In Bologna
“In one single hectic night of paint and spray, BLU cancelled his famous and beautiful graffitis from the walls of Bologna. Here, a powerful cultural institution, Genus Bononiae, funded by private banks and chaired by former dean of the local university Fabio Roversi Monaco, is removing from the walls the works of the best known writers in order to display them – in some cases without the authors’ consent – in an exhibition on street art that will open to the public next Thursday in the city’s historic Palazzo Pepoli.
With the help of a group of squatters, the anonymous writer from Bologna who was signalled in 2011 by the English newspaper “The Guardian” as one of the world’s ten best street artists, destroyed all of his works that were still visible in town: graffitis that had been created throughout twenty or so years of work.
Blu, who has always refused to be interviewed by mainstream media, gave the writers collective known as Wu Ming the task of explaining the meaning of his gesture through their blog “Giap”: “The ‘Street Art’exhibit is the symbol of an idea of the city, based on private hoarding and the transformation of everybody’s life and creativity into a private asset, that must be fought. Confronting the arrogance, worthy of a colonial governor, of those who feel free to remove paintings from walls, the only thing one can do is to make those paintings disappear. Act by subtraction, make the looting impossible. The exhibit clears the way for the accumulation of street art, all for the benefit of ruthless collectors and merchants of stolen artwork. All this, in a city that on one hand prosecutes teenage writers and invokes street decorum, while on the other celebrates itself as the cradle of street art”.”
- via Repubblica.it
