Every year, Dutch NGO StopAidsNow is releasing an Artbag to raise money and awareness for their activities to prevent Aids. The famous bag has been designed by Dick Bruna, Henk Schiffmacher, Viktor & Rolf, Marcel Wanders and Piet Paris in the past. Now they call out to the creative public to design this years ‘crowdbag’.
Graffiti Is Probably Scaring You, Sozyone Gonzalez’ latest exhibition is currently running at the Speerstra Gallery in Switzerland.
Feel-o-meter is an interactive art installation that shows the mood of a city by displaying it in the form of a huge smiley. The system captures the faces of passersby, which are then analysed by a computer program and classified as either happy, sad, or indifferent. The cumulative results determine the expression of the sculpture.
John Spatcher made a LED suit, William Hughes did the boarding & Jacob Sutton made a beautiful surreal film out of it. Wow.
A Perfect Day Tekenshow at Westergasfabriek (Amsterdam) presents drawings of more than 60 international artists who combine image and text. With David Shrigley, Raymond Pettibon, Gummbah and many others. Come by to show your work to curators and people from Kuvva and Vice on 17 February. The exhibition is open daily from 10-24 February.
When photograpy and Photoshop just won’t cut it anymore, what do you do? You start painting photos and ‘Photoshop’ with paint. Amazing hyperrealistic work by Diego Gravinese breathing new life into popart legacy.
What happens when you give thousands of stickers to thousands of kids? Yayoi Kusama re-created a typical home in Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, painting the entire collection of rooms and furnishing pure white. Then she invited children to apply colored stickers in the shape of dots to, in the artist’s words, obliterate the blank canvas.
Erwin Kho is a designer, illustrator and animator from Rotterdam who has a wonderful boxy style as one can see in his lovely and colourful work like Roots and Lekker Puh. For a university of applied sciences he finished a new project together with Lemonscentedtea. Read about his honest view on the creative process at his blog.
The Guggenheim New York hosts an extraordinary retrospective of the extraordinary artist Maurizio Cattelan, known for works as “Him (2001)”, and L.O.V.E.. It actually features *all* of his work, hanging from the ceiling of the central hall of the museum. If the economy prevents you from visiting New York, do download the documentary app, MC-ed by John Waters.
Seriously nice experimental work from the good folks at Resn! Pushing the limits of the Molehill API in Adobe Flash. If you like it, you can vote for it on the FWA.
Vhils is a Portuguese street artist whose portraits are drilled into walls, or made using ink, bleach and found materials. Gestalten has just published a monograph which contains an extensive collection of his personal and commissioned work to date, much of which is published here for the first time.
Rop van Mierlo is nominated for a Dutch Design Award next saturday for his book Wild Animals. For Found by James he created an exclusive poster (a1) of this cute cat, which is available in a limited edition. Read an interview with Rop here.
In this installation visitors use 3 kinect sensors to create a 360-degree scan. This scan is printed by a 3D printer, which creates an army figure style souvenir!
Art loving beerbrand Duvel just started a competition, inviting graphic artists to design their iconic beer vessel. The winner’s glass will be added to the famous Duvel Collection. Dutch designblog Fontanel is part of the jury.
Last week artist and graphic designer Niels ‘Shoe’ Meulman (Calligraffiti, Unruly Gallery) was invited by Converse to Bejing Design Week. The brand organized a ‘Street level typography exhibition‘ for which he was asked. Niels gave a lecture, but sure did some great artworks as well – check the pics on Funkimag.
Don’t you just love it when people are really really really great in creating something nice? American designer Sasha Proodhas a love for handdrawn design on paper, and it shows.
The upcoming movie Contagion got some nice viral attention by taking viral litterally. They have made a billboard filled with bacteria, resulting in an artistic inter- pretation of the spread of a virus as depicted in the film.
Bare Essentials features 50 illustrations of cartoon, movie, video game and comic book characters in their ‘barest essentials’. By reducing some of the world’s most well known characters to simple shapes and colors, Dennis tries to explore the line between recognition and detail.
The name says it all. It isn’t about any form of sexism, it’s simply about celebrating the natural beauty of women.
‘Our Bloodstained Roof‘ is a beautiful comic by the very talented Ryan A. which you can read online on one long page. It really has been a while since I was so taken by both the story and the artwork of a comic book. Please do check his other story ‘Nothing Is Forgotten‘ as well.
For those hardcore Banksy fans, a new app just launched. Banksy-locations guides you along all of his work, including directions, descriptions, photo’s and video’s. The app will update itself with new work that appears, so you won’t miss a thing.
Bring back some nostalgia with Snail Mail My Email, a month-long interactive art project aimed at inspiring people to send their own snail mail. Created by former Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam art director Ivan Cash.
The award-winning short film is now an interactive narrative experience. William Joyce’s “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” blurs the line between picture books and film. Watch the video.
Kuvva, co-founded by my friend Nalden, is a way to bring all the goodness of great designers your Twitter profile. And since today, to your desktop as well. To celebrate this, there is an awesome set of imagery from respected and eclectic artist Piet Parra.
This month the Dutch government announced a 40% cut on the entire financial budget for the arts, which will cause many art projects to disappear. Artists have been protesting largely: Signing petitions, marching, placing smoke bombs, creating infographics, seizing museum buildings, badges on Facebook, keeping track on Google maps, and more. An overview can be found below.
Mediamatic created an interesting infographic to showcase that the Dutch budget for arts & culture is relatively small. The plans for the above average cuts will produce below average results. Profits from the cuts will be very limited, the damages could be tremendous.
Last week we had the grand premiere of our first feature Rabat. It was a perfect night. We released some featurettes about the making of the film as well. And with Dennis Duijnhouwer and Baster we made a beautiful book about the trip we made to shoot the film.
Mimik magazine is a new (online) magazine full of fashion, art and photography. In the first edition they show you in 92 pages their definition of age.
Sober is a multidisciplinary art collective from Rotterdam that originated in 2009. They work in the field of art direction, illustration, murals paintings, live art and stage building. I especially like the video mapping sculpture they made in collaboration with StudioRewind.
On May 17th a new museum opens its doors in Antwerp. The MAS is located on an island in the heart of the old harbour close to the city centre. It will house several collections related to Antwerp’s history. The building alone is worth a visit; it is a 60 metres high tower of stacked exhibition spaces. Each level is twisted 90 degrees to form a giant spiral. (photo by Famooze)