NUART Aberdeen 2018

It’s been a few weeks since NuArt Aberdeen announced its amazing line-up for this year’s event, an event that will find place from Thursday 12 – Sunday 15 April when the Nuart team will be going back to Aberdeen for the 2nd edition of their Aberdeen festival.

Developed in collaboration with Aberdeen Inspired and Aberdeen City Council, Nuart Aberdeen will provide a platform for local, national and international artists to showcase their work through a series of site-specific murals, installations and interventions, supplemented by a conference program, film screenings, walking tours, workshops and temporary exhibitions over four days.

The theme for this year’s Nuart Aberdeen revolves around the concept “A Revolution of the Ordinary”: a look at the parallel world of non-institutional art and culture; an attempt to normalise and reclaim art as an everyday practice and experience. The festival intends, in this way, to take a proactive stance in the democratization of art, working as a catalyst for individual and community development, agency and positive change.

Street Art’s call is to reclaim and broaden the terms ‘Art’ and ‘Artist’, and to remove the shame that those not privileged with an arts education often feel when employing these terms.

As highlighted by Martyn Reed, Director and Curator of Nuart, “the words ‘Art’ and ‘Artist‘ come with a set of predetermined art historical cultural biases; dilemmas; fears; and stereotypes that are too often determined and sustained by the traditional art establishment, promoting art and artists as ‘extraordinary’ and somehow closer to God the creator when in fact most artists are just like you and me: working class people with working class concerns who get up at 8am and work until 5pm, and like a drink or two on a weekend. Yet this is not to say that the work they produce isn’t sometimes exceptional or seemingly ‘extraordinary’.

A broadening and more inclusive definition of the terms ‘Art’ and ‘Artist’ breaks down the elitism in visual art culture by challenging the notion that only a select few people with special talents and understanding can participate in its production and only the moneyed and cultural elite should own and define it.

Street Art’s very existence, not to mention its popularity, is a reflection that we need to explore and promote alternatives to the prevailing status quo. Something Nuart has been dedicated to realising since its inception in 2001.”

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The line-up

Hyuro is an Argentinian-born street and urban artist best known for painterly compositions that combine vernacular depictions of femininity with socio-political undertones.

Originally working on canvas, Hyuro took to the streets after striking up a friendship with Spanish street artist Escif. She has since carved out a reputation for addressing prevalent social and political issues in her work, with the characters she depicts often subordinated by patriarchal and capitalistic systems of power.

By submitting reflections on both individual and collective identities, and questioning the conditions of freedom as the fundamental and inalienable rights of the person, Hyuro has become one of the most influential female artists working in public space today.
Hyuro currently lives and works in Valencia, Spain.
hyuro.es

Bortusk Leer

The self-proclaimed pioneer of ‘art-comedy’, Bortusk Leer’s philosophy is epitomised by his slogan: Cheer Up You Bastards. Since bursting onto the art scene in 2007 Bortusk Leer’s sole purpose has been to put a smile on people’s faces through creating brief encounters that distract us from the seriousness of life.
Based in Amsterdam but originally from the UK, Bortusk Leer’s brightly coloured paintings and paste-ups have appeared on streets around the world. His playful neon monsters occupy walls, windows, doors and electricity boxes wherever he can find them – waiting patiently to surprise the next unsuspecting member of the public.
bortusk.com

Carrie Reichardt is a self-titled ‘craftivist’. Her work blurs the boundaries between craft and activism, using the techniques of muralism, mosaic and screen-printing to create intricate, highly-politicised works of art.
She has been involved in community and public art projects for over 15 years, designing and consulting on large-scale mosaic murals in various local communities. She has produced a community mosaic in Miravalle, one of the most deprived districts on the fringes of Mexico City as well as designed and installed ‘The Art of Recycling’ at Harold Hill Library, Essex, and ‘The Revolution will be Ceramicsed’ in London Portobello. In 2018, Reichardt finally completed the transformation of her west London home into a giant mosaic mural – a process that took twenty years and tens of thousands of tiles to complete.
Trained at Kingston University she achieved a First Class degree in Fine Art from Leeds Metropolitan. She was Artist in Residence at Camberwell Art College in 2009, following this with a period as Artist in Residence at The Single Homeless Project, of which she remains a proactive supporter.
Reichardt is frequently called to speak on the use of craft and art as protest and has presented at National Museums Liverpool’s International Women’s Day lectures and the British Association of Modern Mosaic forum at the V&A, London.
carriereichardt.com

Classically trained as a painter and with a degree in fine art, Lithuanian-born artist Ernest Zacharevic describes himself as “a fine artist who prefers to work on the street.”
Based in Penang, Malaysia, he has built a strong reputation in street and fine-art circles with the emotional impact and interdisciplinary nature of his work. Moving freely between oil painting, installation, sculpture, illustration and stencils, Zacharevic regularly combines real objects and painted figures to produce interesting and exciting compositions.
Focusing mostly on portraits and inspired by the ambience and environment around the site he paints, Zacharevic takes a playful approach to painting. At the heart of his work lies the joy and frivolity of children, whom he portrays in playful scenes that border on the nostalgic.
Recently, Zacahrevic has channeled his efforts into environmental and humanitarian causes with his Splash and Burn project, which aims to raise awareness about widespread deforestation and destruction in Indonesia resulting from the palm oil industry.
ernestzacharevic.com

Phlegm is a Sheffield-based artist who first developed his illustrations in self-published comics. His surreal illustrations can often be found on walls in run-down and disused spaces – his preferred locations.

His storybook-like imagery is half childlike, half menacing; depicting built-up cityscapes with castles, turrets and winding stairways. At other times the city itself is the setting for his long limbed half-human, half-woodland creatures. In this dream world a viewer comes across impossible flying machines and complex networks of levers, pulleys and cogs, set beside telescopes, magnifying glasses and zephyrs.

Working solely in monochrome, his fine technique and intricate detail can be seen as a curiosity cabinet of the mind with each drawing forming part of a grand narrative that extends worldwide in countries including Norway, Canada, Switzerland, Sri Lanka, USA, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Slovakia, Spain and Australia.
phlegmcomicnews.blogspot.no

Initially inspired by the Graffiti scene, Snik is a street art duo that has been working with stencil and spray paint for over ten years.
Staying true to their form, Snik hand cuts up to nine layers of stencil at a time, working with different mediums, techniques, paints and varnishes. Their ethereal compositions combine realism and fantasy with the theatrical play of light and shadow to depict characters suspended in time.
These frozen scenes tell stories of the everyday and the beauty that is found there, but it is Snik’s attention to detail and their bold aesthetic that has most come to define their signature style.
snikarts.com

Dr. D is a London-based artist and ‘subvertiser’. Using a cut and paste technique to ‘doctor’ everything from big brand billboards to political posters, Dr. D mimics the scale and visibility of advertising to raise awareness about who has the power and authority to communicate messages and create meaning in our urban environment.
The act of subverting advertisements (or ‘subvertising’) has long been utilised as a tool for social commentary and protest within the field of street art. Dr. D’s wry and insightful observations often appear in response to current affairs and social debate, providing a subversive take on mainstream news and media.
By incorporating the same aesthetic, logos and fonts of the original material, Dr. D’s interventions are embedded within the physical landscape and can be easy to miss at first glance; emphasizing the insidious nature of outdoor advertising and its cooption of in public space.
drdlondon.com

The Glöbel Brothers, otherwise known as Ciaran Glöbel and Conzo Throb, are a Glasgow-based duo whose public artworks revive the long and venerable tradition of sign painting.
Exploring a more contemporary approach to this antiquated craft since 2013, Ciaran is an artist and graphic designer who uses traditional signwriting tools and techniques to produce striking, hand-painted artworks. In his own words, “Tradition and technology don’t have to be mutually exclusive, so while there is a strong foundation of manual skill and draughtsmanship in signpainting today, the use of technology has revolutionised the way in which hand rendered lettering can be achieved.”
Conzo Throb has been creating artworks that span multiple creative disciplines for over a decade and is responsible for the more figurative and character-based elements in the duo’s outdoor artworks.
cargocollective.com/globelbros

During the early 2000’s, tags and stencils started appearing in Aberdeen city centre and down numerous back alleys: a policewoman, DJ and bag piper all painted in the same vein as Banksy’s early work. These pieces were created by stencil artist Elki, with the now infamous bag piper on Jopps Lane one of the longest standing pieces of street art in The Granite City.
Over the past 15 years Elki has developed a unique, photorealistic style using hand-cut stencils – no mean feat considering the number of layers required for each piece – operating out of his studio in Glasgow.
Having made the move to legal walls and commissions, he has developed his work to produce some of the best stencil pieces in Europe over the past few years. Although his style and execution may have changed since those early days in Aberdeen, Elki continues to produce work with reference to numerous subcultures associated with street art, graffiti, sneaker and DJ culture with the occasional nod to Scottish heritage with the odd bit of tartan here and there!
facebook.com/ELKI.STENCILS

Milu Correch is an Argentinean artist known for her large-scale murals and has established herself as one of South America’s leading figurative street artists.
After being inspired by seeing the work of renowned Argentinian muralists Lean Frizzera and Emy Mariani she attended a workshop by the pair which taught her to “think in m2” and upscale the images in her notebooks to the size of buildings, something she first started doing in 2011.
Taking inspiration from literature, movies and comics Correch’s paintings tend to dissect aesthetic and moral certainties with acute irony. Her “kids on cars” series contained ‘plotlines’ ranging from Classical mythology to Romantic symbolism that embrace childhood impulses and redeem us from the absurdity of adulthood.
Milu Correch lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
milucorrech.com

Nimi and RH74 are a Norwegian street art duo who have worked together on several Nuart projects to date.
Bergen-based, South African born artist Nimi grew up in England and has been an integral part of the Norwegian street art scene for over two decades. A trained architect-turned-street artist, Nimi likes to experiment with a variety of techniques, mediums and creative processes in work that tends to blur the lines between political satire and Romanticism.
RH74 is a Stavanger-based artist and street art enthusiast whose work is a blend of fine and urban art. With a passion for figuration and portraiture she is mainly responsible for the fine details found in the duo’s impressive large-scale murals.
https://www.facebook.com/nimistreetart/
https://www.facebook.com/PaintingOnWood/?pnref=about.overview

Born in Lisbon, Bordalo II’s early interactions with art oscillated between his grandfather’s watercolour paintings of classic Lisbon landscapes and seeing illegal graffiti on the city’s streets.
Big Trash Animals, his series of large-scale sculptures, depicts animals made out of discarded and recycled materials. Through portraying animals made from the materials that are responsible for the destruction of their habitats, Bordalo II draws attention to the problem of waste and pollution, and its effect on the planet.
His works are built with end-of-life materials: the majority found in wastelands, abandoned factories and industrial estates. Damaged car bumpers, used tires, garbage cans and household appliances are just some of the objects that can be identified within his vibrant sculptures; even more so in his latest series of ‘half and half’ sculptures which bring his specific choice of materials, and the message behind his work, to the fore.
bordaloii.com