Brazilian Artwork Views

General Goods

Last year, the press praised the Jonathan LeVine Gallerys’s Brazilian street art finds, marketing urban self-expression as the new avant-garde artwork for your living room. The niche aesthetic soon hit a crowd of art connoisseurs and mainstream celebrities. Pop star Christina Aguilera purchased a canvas by the Paulistano of Japanese ancestry, Hamilton Yokota, who goes by the pseudonym Titi Freak. The 34-year-old, whose talent first manifested itself on the walls of his childhood home as a teenager, has now created artwork for big brand names like Adidas, Nike, and Ecko. While Titi Freak draws from his Eastern and Western influences, his colleagues Boleta, FefPê, Highraff, Kboco, Onesto, Speto, and Zez2ão are equally distinctive and innovative.

Featured within the framework of this concept, original artwork and site-specific installations from internationally acclaimed Brazilian and American artists with roots in urban culture are on view. The exhibition highlights the history and complexity of these interrelated creative cultures between both nations that now are merging with the mainstream art world on an international scale.

TRANSFER is a traveling museum exhibition of Brazilian and American artists who are informed by the youth subcultures of independent music, skateboarding, street art, underground comics and fanzine art from the last two decades. The exhibition includes original artwork and installations from internationally acclaimed Brazilian artists with roots in these subcultures. Various world-renowned American artists that are both influences and contemporaries to their Brazilian counterparts are also included, highlighting the connection and history of these cultures between the two nations. TRANSFER is their first large-scale public exhibition in Brazil. TRANSFER is curated by Lucas Ribeiro, Christian Strike, Fabio Zimbres, and Alexandre Cruz. It is organized by Santander Cultural, and the Cultural Ministry of Sao Paulo, and is produced by Arte3.

With their first public artwork in Manhattan, which went up at the northwest corner of Houston Street and the Bowery on July 17, the Brazilian brothers Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, who call themselves Os G=êmeos, bring graffiti art to its Rococo phase. Which is to say that their fantastic, epic mural, on a concrete wall about 17 feet high and about 51 feet long, is light and frothy, a dream of happiness with an underlying chord of melancholy. And everything in it is exquisitely fine-tuned and detailed, a dazzlement of effortless technique that sustains long bouts of close looking. It will remain up until March.