Banksy has made London's street art scene internationally renowned. Lauren Romano looks at some of the other major names.
Like it or not, street art has become an integrated part of the London landscape. No panorama of urban sprawl would be complete without a ubiquitous littering of tags daubed on walls, billboards and railway bridges. While much of the urban art that we habitually come into contact with may appear to many to be the indelible markings of a toddler brandishing a felt tip pen, a whole underground urban art scene has developed. And it’s not just about Banksy. Through the dissemination of art work via just about any available medium, street art continues to grow and evolve.
As Roktic “Too hip to be square” pop-up shop – a concept store showcasing underground global streetwear labels comes to Brick Lane's East Gallery – we thought it would be an idea to reflect on the fresh street art scene that surrounds us. While most people will no doubt be familiar with Bansky, his name having become the synonym for street art, the works of many other artists and collectives who decorate the east London streets, may still be relatively unfamiliar. To give you a bit of a taster, he's just a few of the anonymous or oddly monikered artists whose work lurks on corners and hoardings near you...
Some of our favourites include Faile's graphically influenced posters and wolf stencils, The Space Invaders’ tiled walls around Covent Garden, Cutups reworked billboard collages, and alphabet-dropping artist Eine’s scatter of giant letters all over Hoxton, which have transformed the area's shutters into a giant word search.
The increasingly commercial value of street art however means that many artists, such as Adam Neate, now use the streets as a starting point, a giant sketchbook of ideas which form the basis of more collectible gallery work. Neate is best known for distributing 1000 works across London for free, but several of his larger paintings have reportedly been sold for up to £75,000.
Similarly, artists such as Pure Evil and D*Face have set up their own gallery spaces. Stolen Space – opened by the latter – has exhibited work by artists as diverse as Chloe Early and The London Police. Best known for their hand drawn, slightly gormless looking stick men, The London Police had a major show last year, celebrating a triumphant decade.
Dexterous disseminator D*Face epitomises the accessibility of street art. Defaced banknotes featuring the faintly ridiculous sight of the Queen with her tongue sticking out are reminiscently juvenile and stir the embers of the inner child within us all.
So, what to expect next? In a subculture where innovation, pragmatism and brazen cheek thrive, the future looks ever more inventive. Word on the street has it that artists in Paris have begin to turn to reverse painting (graffiti in railway tunnels by cleaning away the dirt) while the Graffiti Research Lab (GRL) in the USA are experimenting with projectors, LEDs and batteries to project their tags onto skyscrapers, sticking two fingers up at the boys in blue, keeping them on their toes and practising this widely illegal art form on just about the right side of legality.
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