Rasko Graffiti Vandal ( Russia ) - one of the best Russian street art-graffiti artist.
Banksy is a pseudonymous United Kingdom-based, graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter.His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stencilling technique. Such artistic works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world.Banksy's work was made up of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. According to author and graphic designer, Tristan Manco, and the book Home Sweet Home, Banksy "was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England. The son of a photocopier technician, he trained as a butcher, but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s." Observers have noted that his style is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris. Banksy says, however, that he was inspired by "3D", a graffiti artist who later became a founding member of Massive Attack.Known for his contempt for the government in labelling graffiti as vandalism, Banksy displays his art on publicly visible surfaces such as walls, even going as far as to build physical prop pieces. Banksy does not sell photographs or reproductions of his street graffiti, however, art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder. Banksy's first film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, billed as "the world's first street art disaster movie," made its debut at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.The film was released in the UK on 5 March 2010. In January 2011, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary for the film.
Street art is an umbrella term defining forms of visual art created in public locations, usually unsanctioned artwork executed outside of the context of traditional art venues. The term gained popularity during the graffiti art boom of the early 1980s and continues to be applied to subsequent incarnations. Stencil graffiti, wheatpasted poster art or sticker art, and street installation or sculpture are common forms of modern street art. Video projection, yarn bombing and Lock On sculpture became popularized at the turn of the 21st century.The terms "urban art", "guerrilla art", "post-graffiti" and "neo-graffiti" are also sometimes used when referring to artwork created in these contexts.Traditional spray-painted graffiti artwork itself is often included in this category, excluding territorial graffiti or pure vandalism.Artists who choose the streets as their gallery are often doing so from a preference to communicate directly with the public at large, free from perceived confines of the formal art world. Street artists sometimes present socially relevant content infused with esthetic value, to attract attention to a cause or as a form of "art provocation".Street artists often travel between countries to spread their designs. Some artists have gained cult-followings, media and art world attention, and have gone on to work commercially in the styles which made their work known on the streets.
Frank Shepard Fairey (born February 15, 1970) is an American contemporary street artist, graphic designer activist and illustrator who emerged from the skateboarding scene. He first became known for his "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (…OBEY…) sticker campaign, in which he appropriated images from the comedic supermarket tabloid Weekly World News.He became widely known during the 2008 U.S. presidential election for his Barack Obama "Hope" poster. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston calls him one of today's best known and most influential street artists. His work is included in the collections at The Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Invader is the pseudonym of a French urban artist, born in 1969, who pastes characters from and inspired by the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders, that are composed of small colored square tiles forming a space invader character mural mosaic. He does this in cities across the world, then documents this as an "Invasion", with books and maps of where to find each invader.His website was started in 2008.The mosaics depict characters from Space Invaders and other video games from the early 1980s. The images in these games were made with fairly low-resolution graphics, and are therefore suitable for reproduction as mosaics, with tiles representing the pixels. The tiles are difficult to damage and weather-resistant, but Invader estimates that more than 15% of his early pieces, ones that were small and placed rather low, have been removed.
Mr. Brainwash – often stylized as MBW – is the moniker of Paris-born, Los Angeles-based filmmaker and street artist Thierry Guetta. According to the Banksy-directed film Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), Guetta began as a proprietor of a clothing store and amateur videographer who filmed street artists through the 2000s and "evolved" into an artist in his own right in a matter of weeks after an off-hand suggestion from Banksy. Guetta was first introduced to street art by his cousin, the street artist Invader.Guetta does not typically have much physical involvement in the construction of the artwork attributed to him; he passes ideas to his creative team, mostly graphic designers who carry out the artistic side instead of Guetta. Mimicking his associate Banksy, Guetta employs famous artistic and historic images, many of which are copyrighted, and amends the originals in sometimes slight, sometimes significant ways. A number of critics have observed that his works strongly emulate the styles and concepts of Banksy, and have speculated that Guetta is an elaborate prank staged by Banksy who may have created the works himself. Banksy insists on his official website, however, that Exit Through the Gift Shop is authentic and that Guetta is not part of a prank.His work sold for five-figure sums at his self-financed debut exhibit Life is Beautiful due, it is thought, to a mixture of an over heated and hyped street art market and – according to Banksy and Shepard Fairey as seen in Exit – his misuse of endorsements from Banksy and Fairey. The exhibit was held in Los Angeles, California, on June 18, 2008, and was a popular and critical[citation needed] success. In 2009, Madonna paid Guetta to design the cover art for her Celebration album. Many street artists and graffiti artists have spoken out against Guetta and his practice of allegedly stealing ideas from street artists and mainstream artists alike. Guetta also has come to symbolize the capitalist turn that street art has taken in recent years.
Andy Warhol ( August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist.Warhol's art encompassed many forms of media, including hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was also a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1984, two years before his death. He founded Interview Magazine and was the author of numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. He is also notable as a gay man who lived openly as such before the gay liberation movement. His studio, The Factory, was a famous gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons.Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books, and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame". Many of his creations are very collectible and highly valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$105 million for a 1963 canvas titled "Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)". A 2009 article in The Economist described Warhol as the "bellwether of the art market".Warhol's works include some of the most expensive paintings ever sold.
