Live Street Art Auction – Friday 20-27th July 2007

Cargo, 6pm-9pm, FREE ENTRY, ALL PROCEEDS TO CHARITY

Evolving Styles is a live street art auction, inviting the finest street artists from around the world to paint live and auction their art off, all in the name of charity. In association with street wear label Boxfresh, Cargo’s outside space is turned into a live art studio / sealed auction house, but unlike Christie’s or Sotheby’s, this auction house has a BBQ, the best DJs playing out and world-famous artists creating original works to auction off on the same night.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

LADY PINK

Lady Pink was born in Ecuador, but raised in NYC. She started writing graffiti at the age of 15 and soon was well known as the only female capable of competing with the boys in the graffiti subculture. Pink painted subway trains from the years 1979-1985. She is considered a cult figure in the hip-hop subculture since the release of the independent motion picture ‘Wild Style’ in 1982, in which she had a starring role. While still in high school she began exhibiting paintings in art galleries and at the age of 21 had her first solo exhibit at the Moore College of Art. As a leading participant in the rise of graffiti-based art, Lady Pink’s canvasses have entered important art collections such as the Whitney Museum, the MET in NYC, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of the City of NY, the Groningen Museum of Holland and many others. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout the world in noteworthy places such as The Bronx Museum, The Queens Museum, Le Case D’Arte in Milan, Lisson Gallery in London, Inhound Museum in Geneva, Sidney Janis Gallery in NYC, and the Federal Reserve Board in Washington DC.

TASSO

TASSO, who first emerged from East Germany’s prolific graffiti scene, is a master of illusion. His photorealist graffiti has been known to stop traffic through the general public’s sheer amazement at his innovative foolery. Using a spray can in place of an art brush, TASSO takes over public facades including houses and trains, creating masterpieces characterised by highly detailed optical illusion. An extraordinary and influential artist, TASSO’s inimitable depictions transform anything his art tools touch into realistic projections of the modern world. TASSO is a founding member of the ‘Ma ‘Claim crew, one of the most respected graffiti collectives in Germany.

XENZ

Xenz, an artist with over 18-years experience in graffiti culture, is the UK’s most celebrated freestyle artist. While many of his contemporaries in the early-nineties were following the traditional rules of the original wildstyle graffiti masters, Xenz, having developed an extraordinary cohesion between mind, memory and spray can, would instead walk up to a city wall and paint a landscape from his imagination. Combining fantasy with strong architectural and soft natural landscapes, he transforms the city’s streets into both art canvas and gallery using the spray can as his medium. Doing for 21st century street art what Monet did for 19th century fine art, Xenz’s original approach to his medium and innovations in the study of freestyling have seen the graffiti scion break many of the rules that had been set by earlier generations. Xenz is widely considered to be the UK’s most important graffiti artist after Banksy.

NICK WALKER

Nick Walker is one of the most acclaimed artists to have emerged from Bristol’s stencil art scene of the early 1980s. As an early pioneer of the movement, Nick became infamous for his EGO street tag, before evolving into a new incarnation – the Apish Angel. Today, Nick combines intricate stencil images with his freehand methods, which pushes the boundaries of the contemporary art movement. He is one of the most sought-after and respected artists working in the industry today. Nick’s work has appeared on films including Judge Dredd, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and many more. He has exhibited at an impressive list of international galleries and his work is often published in the most high profile graffiti books.

PART 2

Legendary artist, Part 2 is the founder of photorealist graffiti in the UK and the mind behind the first national and international graffiti crews, Aerosol Nation and Ikonoklast. One of the few graffiti writers working in the UK in the 1980s, the Yorkshire based artist evolved the original wild style lettering of New York that had filtered through to the UK, manipulating his spray can to create a unique style, known as photorealistic graffiti. The artist’s career spans three decades, with each new style laying down pathways and inspiring his contemporaries worldwide. His early works on the graffiti scene plus his notorious disposable graffiti project known as Serialtype, have been widely documented. Part 2 is also the founder and producer of acclaimed music trio, New Flesh.

HERAKUT

Herakut is a symbiosis of the aliases Hera and Akut, two graffiti artists from Frankfurt and Erfurt, Germany. Their collaboration started in 2004, when they both were invited to paint at the Urban Art Festival Sevilla in Spain, though to everyone including themselves it was clear that their styles of character painting had nothing in common whatsoever. And that has not changed a bit. When Akut and Hera paint together, they do shift work. After a background done by Hera, Akut creates a detailed layer for a face without knowing what kind of body Hera will add the end. The reason for mixing these two different signatures is simply for the element of surprise. The final picture always seems slightly schizophrenic, because a character by Herakut always contains two different moods at the same time. Their work has appeared at international exhibitions and they have been published in several book titles.