Press Release
Thursday, August 28, 2008, at 19:00 the Aarhus Art Building presents the opening of
Icons for Now
If you like strolling around in a city, the non-traditional exhibition Icons for Now will reward the observant city walker. In the days leading up to the Aarhus Festival, gables and streets in Aarhus will be decorated with street art of the best kind. In the course of the month of August ten Danish and international artists will gather in Aarhus to offer their personal interpretations of art in the cityscape. Icons for Now will yield works that will hopefully impact the look of the city for many years to come.
The participating artists are: André alias Monsieur A (FR), Blu (IT), Faust (DK), Herbert Baglione (BR), HuskMitNavn (DK), Miss.Tic (FR), Steve Powers (US), Søren Behncke alias papfar (DK), Victor Ash (FR/PT/DK) and Zevs (FR).
Most of the artists participating in Icons for Now have a background as graffiti writers or artists, but a few of them have other sources of inspiration and a history of political activism and graphic design. A common denominator is that their means of expression are immediately accessible and that they communicate directly to people passing by. Another commonality is that they have not been promoted by an established network within the world of art but first received recognition through alternative culture-periodicals, specialized web-pages and galleries and, not least, the audience of the street.
With an established institution behind them the artists participating in Icons for Now now have the opportunity to create a series of works unique to Arhus with a greater longevity than they can usually expect. For a period the works will be secured as icons in the cityscape, after which they will be left to the city for an indeterminate time period. They are “icons for now” because they represent a series of manifestations in a contemporary age that by nature is of a fleeting quality.
The individual artists are recognized for their new thinking within the genre of street art and for their original interpretations of this culture in the metropolis. All the artists create their art in a dialogue with signs of the urban world surrounding them and at the same time the works of the artists are aesthetic, provocative and spontaneous and constitute one of the most important currents within contemporary art and design.
The exhibition will be curated by Miriam Nielsen and Toke Lykkeberg, and several of the artists will be present at the opening. Immediately before the opening the curators have arranged a guided tour of all the works participating in the exhibition. Meeting time and place for the guided tour: Thursday, August 28 at 16:30 at the Aarhus Art Building.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a small catalogue fit for a back pocket - containing a map showing locations in the city where the individual works can be found. The catalogue can be obtained at the Art Building. The map can also be found at www.aarhuskunstbygning.dk; in addition a map is printed on the back of this press release.
The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between The Aarhus Art Building and the Aarhus Festival. The exhibition is sponsored by the Cultural Development Foundation, the Municipality of Aarhus, The Danish Arts Council’s Committee for Visual Arts, Diesel, Calorama, All Remove and the Nordea-Danmark Fund.
AARHUS ART BUILDING
