StreetArt

Jesus Stops Traffic on 5th Ave

Filed under: Art

A row of cars waiting for a green light was concealed by four large canvases proceeding across New York's busy Fifth Ave., creating the appearance of emptiness from W. 51st St to Central Park and beyond. Artist Nelson Diaz chose Palm Sunday to reveal his latest project, "The Isolated Christ," to the people of New York. The response to this unique mix of street art, performance art and oil on canvas was nothing short of astounding.

Five years in the making, The Isolated Christ is a four-part rendering of the most famous figure in one of Leonardo Da Vinci's most recognized works. Diaz "isolated" the image of Jesus Christ from the apostles in DaV inci's "The Last Supper" and plotted thousands of points on the image by hand. Then, using advanced calculus techniques, he fed the point into an equation that exposes "hidden" four dimensional space in the original image and used the results as the foundation for his signature perspective.

The result is four faces of DaVinci's Jesus, reflecting various situations. The final canvas – transcendence – offers an obscure, almost headless presentation, signifying the departure from the norm. The meaning is left to the viewer, with the religious assuming resurrection and the atheist likely to posit obsolescence. Diaz remains coy with his intention, believing that interpretation (like faith) is a personal affair.

With half a decade spent on the vision and production of The Isolated Christ (all four paintings were completed by hand – sans brushes, literally with his fingers), Diaz spent the last few months struggling with venue. He decided last summer to skip the traditional alternatives (such as art galleries) during his protest against the treatment of art as a commodity, during which he auctioned 10 paintings on eBay for the princely starting bid of $1 each.

"The old way of doing things is dead," he explained during several of our meetings. Deep-pocketed buyers writing checks for pieces they don't understand, he believed, would not be able to sustain itself ... a lesson to which the art market was treated last September. Diaz wanted a public setting. As with his eBay experiment, he wanted to return the aesthetic to everybody, not a self-proclaimed elite.

That left only one "gallery" from which to choose: the streets of Manhattan.

Gallery: Nelson Diaz and The Isolated Christ

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First Shepard Fairey Survey to Open at Boston's ICA

by Tracy Chait (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Art

Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art has announced it will host the first museum survey of Shepard Fairey's provocative street art. The exhibition is aptly named Supply and Demand (recall how tricky it was to get your hands on Fairey's Obama gear) and will chronicle Fairey's 20-year reign as the guerrilla multi-media operative he is. It will also include a new mural commissioned specifically for the museum. Fairey is heavily involved in the plans -- he'll be plastering lucky Boston with public works of art and will even DJ on opening night.

Known for his shape-shifting tendencies -- the artist regularly jumps the boundaries between commercial and fine art -- Fairey's point of view is unwavering. "The real message behind most of my work is 'question everything,'" he told ICA curators.

The exhibit opens February 6 and will run through August 16.

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Banksy Works Fail to Sell at Auction

by Tracy Chait (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Auctions, Art

Banksy, the British graffiti artist who remains semi-anonymous, had five of his works at a Lyon and Turnbull auction in London over the weekend. None of them sold.

Part of the problem stemmed from Banksy's refusal to claim the work as his own. Banksy has a history of stating that street art should remain in its places of origin, and this group of pieces had been moved. In the past the controversial artist's work has earned double the expected auction price.

[via The New York Times]

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Tags: auction, banksy, graffiti, street art, StreetArt