Urban Art Collection
The market for street art is growing, as collectors find themselves drawn to urban art’s humour and emotional edge. Helping maintain graffiti and street art’s mainstream popularity is the successful Beyond The Streets exhibition at Saatchi Gallery (closing May 9th 2023), displaying the work of over 100 street artists including KAWS, Keith Haring and Imon Boy. You can read our review of the exhibition here. Here are five urban art figures, who are either making a name for themselves in the street art scene or are already at their apex.
Work by the Spanish artist Pejac (born Silvestre Santiago in 1977) is recognisable by his mastery of trompe-l’œil techniques and his poetic, poignant and often provocative compositions which speak to our fears and vulnerabilities - particularly relating to the climate crisis. H2O is one such work, which casts a critical eye on our consumerist attitude to water. Made in 2019 - 50 years after the first moon landing - Pejac depicts a stranded astronaut and anchor, positioning the moon as both a land of great human technological achievement and perhaps as a foreshadowing of our own planet’s fate if we do not begin to take the problem of water scarcity seriously. The 0/100 edition print is available for purchase through Artscapy for £8,000. The artist trained at the Accademia di Bella Arti di Milano and is known for his outdoor murals and recreations of art historical masterpieces by the likes of Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Eugène Delacroix. His murals can be seen around the world including in the United States of America, London, Milan and Hong Kong.
Thierry Noir, born in 1958 in France, is best known for his contributions to the iconic street art seen on the Berlin Wall. The artist moved to the German capital in 1982 shortly before the unification of Germany, and became one of the first artists (often cited as the very first) to use the wall as their canvas, prompting suspicion from Berliners that Noir might be a French intelligence agent. His trademark colourful figures can be seen throughout the world including Los Angeles, Sydney, and Tokyo, and his original Berlin Wall artworks are still a tourist favourite and a site of pilgrimage for street art fans. His ‘Fast Form Manifest’ style uses a limited colour palette, and Heads (2012) - for £5,000 - encapsulates the naive approach to portraiture and iconic side profiles for which Noir is praised as an urban art pioneer.
Lucie Flynn is a contemporary British artist who started out as part of YBA’s legend Damien Hirst’s studio. Her large-scale mural paintings, made using combinations of spraypaint, inks, collage, and acrylic in complex layers, are unique in their fluidity, emotionality, and sense of spontaneity. She received training in fine art and textile printing, gaining skills which are evident in her painterly approach to street art. She has had sell-out exhibitions in London and Liverpool, and her works are held in several international private collections. Her 2022 text-based print Mother Daughter Rebel is a punchy, emotionally charged call to action. Lucie has collaborated with two other artists in Artscapy’s Urban Art Collection, Ben Eine and Banksy, and has spoken out about the lack of representation of women within the street art and graffiti scene.
Ben Eine (born Benjamin Flynn in London in 1970) or sometimes known as Eine, is best known for his typographical street art murals which can be found in London, Paris and Stockholm. His start in urban art was as a graffiti writer and he quickly found the font style for which he is now internationally famous. His lettering is reminiscent of high Victoriana and is suggestive of grandeur, permanence and playfulness. Eine has also produced clothing (having collaborated with Nike and Adidas and launching his own fashion brand EINE in 2018 as part of London Fashion Week), paintings on canvas and paper, and screen prints as well as his murals. His Open Edition, hand-finished spray paint on canvas work Love (2019) embodies the quintessential Eine style.
Banksy is the most famous street artist in the world, aided by his anonymity, large-scale works and guerrilla interventions. Born in Bristol and creating his first stencilled works there during the 1990s, Banksy garnered international attention from the early stages of his career. His work has been a catalyst for the wider acceptance of graffiti as a legitimate art form for both the public and collectors’ alike, and his 2006 work Well Hung Lover on Bristol’s Frogmore Street is Britain’s very first legal piece of street art. His 2010 documentary Exit Through the Giftshop and 2015 pop-up theme park Dismaland further boosted his reputation, and the artist regularly sells for millions at auction. His stencilled designs criticising power imbalances and governmental failure are loved around the world. Flying Copper (2004) is a print of an iconic early work by Banksy. The artwork showing a policeman with a smiley face head, full armour, gun and small white wings was Banksy’s first print release in collaboration with the British-Greek Cypriot publisher Steve Lazarides. Murals of the design can be found in several European capitals including Vienna and Berlin.
