Last weekend saw the conclusion of Bartek Świątecki’s Chasing The Wind exhibition at Chenus Longhi in Paris. It seems that Poland has produced a disproportionately large number of artists who started out writing graffiti and have then stretched the movement’s foundational principles to oblivion in their own unique ways, creating new languages of expression in the process. Świątecki, also known as Pener, was part of the Spectrum crew alongside the likes of Proembrion and later painted walls in Bydgoszcz with Sainer and Bezt before increasingly turning his attention to his studio practice. His ..read more

Banksy is back, with a new, large-scale street piece appearing overnight on a residential building on Hornsey Road, midway between the Archway and Finsbury Park areas of North London. AM was prompted out of hermit mode, jumped on a bus, and went to have look, before the artwork could be dogged by the petty-minded/envious, sidebusted by coattail-riders, or covered in perspex.  The whimsical mural interacts with a tree in the foreground — a rather sad-looking, currently leafless specimen that was aggressively lopped and topped by local authorities. Having taken mat ..read more

For three months, visitors are invited to step aboard Invader Space Station to experience the Parisian artist’s most artistically and physically expansive exhibition to date. The show is being held in the modernist edifice which was once home to Libération, the newspaper whose pages the artist invaded in 2011. Upon entering, visitors are met with a barrage of sound and light emanating from an installation which occupies the entirety of the first of nine floors; the classic Space Invaders arcade game has been reimagined in physical form with the rigid, plastic lane dividers that are a common s ..read more

Mixing art and fine dining, Sickboy (interviewed) is kicking off his latest show at the high-end department store Harvey Nichols tonight with a launch dinner and artist's talk. Optical Delusions builds upon his ever-expanding use of semiotics to create a dream-like world that glows and radiates light. The Bristol-based artist has long experimented with an array of unorthodox mediums: from painting on bell-jars in the early 2000s, to creating tapestries a decade later and onwards to the lightboxes which dominate this most recent exhibition. These illuminated works appear like a modernist evoca ..read more

Closing today after a four week run, Phosphene is José Parlá’s second show at Ben Brown Fine Art’s London location. The title references the phenomenon of seeing light without any external stimulus and the exhibition features 11 large scale canvases infused with kinetic and sensory energy. For many, graffiti is a means to exist beyond the corporeal and social confinement of our current circumstances and the now Brooklyn-based artist's Ease tag was like a visual mantra repeated across south Miami in search of personal perfection. His balletic hand-style is still a foundational element of his w ..read more

Earlier this month, Jeff Soto's (interviewed) new exhibition Sadlands opened up in West Hollywood at KP Projects. Showing though the end of the month, the striking new body of work featured almost 20 medium to large sized paintings inspired by a post-apocalyptic Southern Californian landscape. Each piece, rendered in vibrant colors, correlates loosely with a location that the Riverside native denoted on a map (displayed in the gallery) with the sides of the frames painted to color coordinate with each pinned location. This conceptual thread nicely holds the new pieces that comprise the s ..read more

Earlier this week, Alistair Canvin presented his debut solo exhibition at Plan X Gallery in Milan. The show, entitled Do Not Over Inflate, presents a series of photorealistic paintings depicting deflated flamingoes, crocodiles and beach balls set against a backdrop of water-refracted pool tiles. The partial use of an airbrush captures the tactile, plasticky feel of those objects and evokes memories of holidays in the sun. At first glance, the work’s aesthetic appears to reference youthful simplicity and the carefree optimism of childhood. But, this obscures a conceptual focus instead on adult ..read more

After a sold-out 10 week run at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art, Banksy’s first solo show in almost 14 years comes to a close next week. The exhibition, entitled Cut and Run, gives the public the opportunity to rediscover paintings which have appeared around the world over the last 25 years; many of these can no longer be found on the street and, in some cases, the streets themselves no longer even exist. The exhibition displays the original stencils used to create many of his instantly recognizable images so, while the exhibition acts as a sort of retrospective and many will be familiar with ..read more

The art establishment has a less than distinguished history when it comes to embracing artists who fall outside of its comfortably familiar linear narrative of western art. Impressionism was a derogatory name bestowed by the art critic Louis Leroy and the fabled Salon des Refusés exhibition of work by the movement’s most prominent figures was comprised of pieces rejected by the the Académie des Beaux-Arts’s annual exhibition in Paris. With stylewriting - or graffiti, as its early detractors called it - history has repeated itself and, aside from a few notable exceptions, art institutions have ..read more

Despite the indisputable importance of digital media in the art world, the appetite for physical books remains undimmed and this year has seen the release of some beautifully crafted works. So, in no particular order, here are our favorite books published in 2022. ‘4000’ by INVADER The Parisian-artist’s global invasion is undoubtedly one of the largest and most ambitious art projects that has ever been undertaken. In addition to photos of all 4000 pieces which he has created in 80 cities worldwide over the last 23 years, this dense, pocket-sized almanac also provides statistical analysis ab ..read more