2019
In this edition of Urvanity we feature a special section devoted to individual exhibitions of selected artists. This section put the focus on those young or more renowned artists, who for the quality and complexity of their work, deserve to be presented in a more complete way to the public.
JAN KALÁB – MAGMA GALLERY // MISS VAN – FOUSION GALLERY // SAM3 – DOPPELGAENGER // DAN WITZ – WUNDERKAMMERN
Dan Witz (Chicago, 1957) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. The artist has an extensive academic background that includes studies in fine art and design. Influenced by punk culture, he began his career in 1979 and quickly became one of the leading pioneers of street art. Challenging the more traditional canons of the art world, Witz chose to focus on street art, creating installations in the streets of numerous international cities and expressing his ideas freely and directly.
At the beginning of his career, Dan Witz concentrated on hyperrealism, which he explored through painting. His method later evolved into public installations, which had to be realised in a very short time. The artist is inspired by the social changes of his time, which he reflects in his artistic production. His street interventions are related to political and economic issues.
Jan Kaláb (Prague, 1978) is one of the most important artists of international urban and geometric abstraction. Born in Prague in 1978, he soon became one of the most important local writers, and also founded a famous crew, DSK. Signed as Cakes he travelled around Europe and America, developing his style towards 3D Graffiti. Under the name Point he made installations with abstract letterforms, placed in the streets or hung on walls, seeking ever larger dimensions. These works, although technically far from graffiti, take him to a higher level of abstraction.
Since 2007 he explores abstract painting with a variety of infinite tones, expressing his own language through a perfect balance between forms and minimalism, capable of generating surprising effects of depth and dynamism.
Miss Van began painting on the streets in 1993, at the age of 20, thus pioneering the women's street art movement. Originally from Toulouse, France, she has spent most of her artistic life in Barcelona, Spain, and for decades has shown her iconic female figures all over the world. Miss Van's recent artistic pursuits mark a return to street art, after several years spent exclusively painting in the studio, charging her new works with greater depth, emotion and heightened romanticism, darkness and delicacy.
His iconic, passionate female characters reappear with sensual, dark animal masks and evolving environments. In a steamy romantic composition, they have a surreal burlesque quality, resonating with a beautiful synergy of rawness, softness and emotion.
SAM3 (Elche, 1980). Faithful to the clandestine and anti-systemic nature of new urban art, Sam3 prefers to speak through his own murals, often monochromatic, centred on the human figure. SAM3's works can be found all over the world and have been published by major publishers in the field.
Reluctant to define, Sam3 considers the adjective "urban" to be superfluous when applied to his work, but his public interventions are extremely sensitive to the suggestions of the environment in which they fit and to the gaze of the casual public on the street, with whom he establishes a close relationship. His poetic and ironic imagination takes shape through an astonishing speed of execution, a technical mastery that is preferably expressed on large surfaces and materialised in anamorphic representations.