Dennis Hollingsworth: Street Art BCN Style

February 4, 2005

Street Art BCN Style

Yesterday, we went to Barcelona for Stephanie's fashion safari. I served as assistant and security detail. Maybe it's because we were there in the early morning, the danger of street crime seemed pretty low. Maybe it's because this district of Barcelon'a ancient urban core has become gentrified as time goes on... there's still enough edge to keep your street antenna up just in case.

While we were there, I shot a few pics of the street grafitti. I kept the file sizes small, but beware: there are over twenty pics of street art for your viewing pleasure:

Many of these are of a special type: tight cuts, precise drawings, stencil spray.

This was on a hood of a car.

I'm not sure if all of these cut stencils are from the same hand. Certainly, this image could be of the artist himself, an ad of sorts. The nature of the technique could mask different authors: foto based imaging, x-acto blade linework, stuff like that.

This may be an ad for one of the many anarchist organizations here in Catalonia. I'm not sure at all. They've got generations of anarchists here, of many different types... but I'm not the one to go on about it though.

This one is pretty standard, Che-type strong counter-mainstream male image. Except that this is well mainstreamed by now.

Stuff like this reminds me of David Amico's work (click link and see the third image down at the bottom of the page for an example of his work). David is very good at taking the best of street art and porting it into his large ACE gallery (LA) sized canvases. Here's a good link to his work. Check it out!

This makes me think of all those poor ducks meeting an untimely death in Vietnam right now.

OK, this is more commercial art than the spawn of desperate creative srteet youth. But it is remarkable that the design arts in Spain have steered the cultural flowering in these post Franco years. This would not be the emblem of that flowering...