featured artists
Anne Schinko & Ruli
Axel Schindler
Berni Puig & Mateu Targa
Boaz Untay
Bordalo II
Duo Amazonas
Gamze Yalçin
Jakob der Bruder
Jay Coleman
Julia Benz
Kartel
Luna Doz
Mots
Nasca
Olivier Hölzl
Senkoe
Sisa Soldati
Skirl
Sobekcis
Somadifusa
Tec Fase
Thiago Mazza
PHOTOGRAPHY
Jolly Schwarz, Michael Stanzer, Marlene Nemuth
LOCATIONS
Nordwestbahnhof Vienna
Bajo el cemento está tu alimento. Anne Schinko grew up in a small village in Upper Austria. Influenced by her grandfather, she began painting early in her childhood. During her studies, she initially focused on other things, like political science. A trip to Mexico, however, made her rediscover her passion for painting. Her travels and the people she meets along the way are inspiration for her works. After returning from Latin America, she has lived and worked as a muralist in Morocco, Andorra, and Portugal. For some time now, she has been painting murals with her partner, Ruli. They share not only the attachment to art but also the love of nature, in which they are usually found.
anne Schinko & Ruli
Austria & Argentina
Austria
In a row. Axel’s wall works with the balance between a group of people moving in the same direction and their botanical but urban surroundings.
It’s about the moment when a community and nature are connected.
Axel Schindler lives and works in Vienna. His works cover illustration, paintings, and murals, which he has shown in different galleries and countries. He mostly works with figurative subjects that explore abstraction, and his focus is humorous but intense storytelling through color. Accessible concepts that play with contradictions and contrast are the connecting elements in his work.
Spain
Ignasi, Pep, Anna, Clara, Julia, Mateu i Berni. There’s an antagonism the two artists share in their respective pictorial styles: Puig with his reductionist abstraction of geometric forms with flat colors, and Targa with his full and realistic pictorial style reminiscent of impressionism.
They have worked together on different occasions, trying to merge the two styles in the same medium, combining and seeking a dialogue. As a referent, the two artists chose to use analogue photographs of their joint parties at Konvent in Berga, to which they apply graphic elements via Berni's abstraction.
In the works, Berni and Mateu play with the concept of censorship in order to deflect it. The placidity of the abstract elements pushes the gaze towards the contours of the frame, where the viewer discovers a breast, bottles of alcohol, and other elements that are traditionally censored.
Wild horses that represent the idea of going back to a lifestyle that is more raw and free, taking nature as an inspiration for future communities, also represent the will to move forward, stay humble, and be compassionate to each other.
Israel
Boaz Sides, aka Untay, began his professional artistic path by painting on the streets of Tel Aviv after graduating with a B.Des from the visual communications program at HIT. In the past decade, he has broadened his oeuvre to include a variety of street and studio works, tattoos, as well as curatorial work and the production of alternative, independent art events and exhibitions.
Trash Animals. Artur Bordalo processes plastic waste into huge sculptures and wall reliefs depicting animals. For the festival, he designed a seven-meter-high and five-meter-wide squirrel growing out of the front of a Northwest Station warehouse.
Portugal
In memory of one of his most famous murals—a red squirrel—that was destroyed in Dublin, Bordalo II resurrects it for the Calle Libre festival as a colorful trash sculpture. The animal's cuteness is a deception, however, and the artist's concern becomes apparent upon closer examination of the material: "Misdirected" waste leads to decades of accumulation of toxic constituents in our environment and in garbage areas. "This waste comes back to us in one way or another if we don't take care of it properly," according to the artist.
Duo Amazona’s proposal starts from the representation of the human figure in scenes or daily actions. With this resource, the recognition of what is common is necessary. In this way, they can rethink the ways of communicating, inhabiting our environment, inspiring communal actions, the importance of human ties, and the recognition behind our history.
Argentina & Colombia
They believe that muralism is a place of exchange and dialogue: a community exercise that begins with our cultural background, individually and as a team, receiving feedback from its context and the rest of the community participants in order to develop diverse and common narratives.
Dúo Amazonas is a muralism collective established in 2017 by Natalia Andreoli (Argentina, 1992) and Lina Castellanos (Colombia, 1990). The team was born as a necessity to create, and develop, a space for artistic and cultural experimentation, research and dialogue.
Turkey
Gamze is a Berlin-based visual artist and painter; she was born and grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Art University in 2010. Her work mainly deals with the themes of female forms, dreams, landscape, and nature. Characterized by a colorful palette, cosmic signs, female power, and journey stories Gamze’s work ranges from mural painting to studio practice for galleries and projects across Europe.
The Viennese artist Jakob der Bruder inspires with his symbiosis of classic graffiti letters and abstract and figural elements from everyday life.
Austria
On closer inspection, his detailed graffiti hides stories and scenes, figures, faces, and organic elements that invite viewers to linger and discover. The compositions of color and line arise spontaneously, are influenced by the respective environment, and partly reinterpret existing fantasy worlds from film and comics. Most of the time, his pieces are created with spray cans and paint rollers and can be found in public spaces or well hidden in many corners of the city.
With experience teaching and as an administrator in public, private and charter schools, Jay Coleman has concentrated his expertise in the eld of special education and has been in the service of children for over 15 years. As a professional artist and father, his sensitivity to the human spirit has enabled him to educate and inspire parents and students alike.
As a portrait painter, he has been commissioned by presidents of colleges and countries (Angola, Cape Verde). His portrait of Rosa Parks hung at her memorial service and his murals bring color to many DC schools and communities.
USA
A deep trust in the painterly process is an essential part of her work. Julia Benz works without strict presetting or composition. In her works, layers overlap; areas are continued, added to, or completely covered, depending on how the forms and colors develop with each other in the painting process. This freedom to react intuitively to the process is very important to her.
Germany
Between nostalgia and the present. Inspired by everyday life and the elementary artifacts of our society, Kartel’s work always moves between these two concepts of past and present moments. In the process, familiar design boundaries between tradition, craftsmanship, and digital design are broken and transformed into a new context.
His high-contrast, semi-abstract compositions are reminiscent of remnants of a bygone era. Kartel lives and works in Berlin.
Germany
Catharsis. Luna Doz is an Italian-Austrian artist based in Vienna with an interest in topics around nature, the feminine and the human existential struggle in its different faces. She mostly chooses the use of a black and white minimalistic technique because of the larger range of possibilities it offers.
Austria
Poland & Portugal
MOTS - the duo of urban artists from Porto, Portugal and Opole, Poland, created by Diogo Ruas, painter and illustrator, and Jagoda Cierniak, photographer and project coordinator.
Their collaboration fused their individual approaches characterized by Diogo’s experience as an urban artist and Jagoda’s engagement in social grassroots initiatives and art projects.
The mural started from a photo taken by Jagoda of peeling eucalyptus bark from Portugal. Diogo created a project based on this very picture because of its layout: a composition made of interlaced barks that resembles a rhizome tangle. We see it as a network of non-obvious shapes, which is always a sticking point for our art projects.
Germany
Metamorphosis. Muralist, painter, and illustrator Nasca One is best known for his lush, powerful, and funky surrealistic figurative sceneries featuring striking imagery of ethnic elements and psychedelic visions of flora and fauna.
Growing up in the early 1990s in Munich to a mixed German-Peruvian family, Nasca began drawing influences from his love for American and Japanese comic strips and his Peruvian heritage. His craft developed early in his teens, when he began doing graffiti and later larger-scale murals in his hometown of Munich. During his studies in media design, he lived abroad in Asia, where his international painting career started. Influenced by new cultures and people, Nasca’s style of painting evolved. His signature style focuses on uniquely rendered figurative paintings of people, animals, special organisms, and fungi like those that produce altered states of mind in the human experience.
olivier hÖlzl
Austria
Positivgesellschaft des ständigen Vergleichs.
“When I read contemporary philosophical literature that critically examines the digital information age, I collect word formations that describe our epoch. I am also interested in "concrete poetry." Thus, the idea arose to create building constructions by repetition from the collected words.” - Olivier Hölzl
Senkoe’s work is a continuous reference to the discourse of identity present in the use and reinterpretation of prehispanic aesthetics, the use of textiles and handcrafted references in the imaginary, mystical, and typical pre-Columbian cultures, mixed with current references like pop culture, graphic design, and illustration.
Mexico
Silent Transformation. Can the immensity of nature help us recognize ourselves in relation to something bigger than ourselves?
Argentina
Since 2015, Sisa Soldati has been exploring painting in large formats traveling through different countries. In her artistic research, she explores the possibilities of the landscape, nature and our bond with it, seeking to reveal the depth of nocturnal plant spaces and their possibilities for the world.
Manuel Skirl's distinctive style is defined by organic structures of black and blue lines. Based in Vienna, the artist uses his technique on a variety of surfaces, including prints, trains, buildings, museums, basketball courts, as well as textiles.
Austria
With his hand-cut roller, he leaves an unmistakable, more or less abstract, mark on walls. These marks can be found throughout Europe and other places, such as Palestine, Thailand, Indonesia, the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom.
Garden. The twin brother duo Sobekcis was born in Belgrade, Serbia in 1991. After finishing high school in 2010 both started studies at the University of Applied arts Vienna, Class Kartak Graphic design .
Serbia
Since moving back to Belgrade in the beginning of 2015, they have switched their focus in the medium of fine art and studio work, from figurative forms depicted in earlier works.
To a new body of work which is in essence focused more on forms, color and compositions. Interplaying the influence and forms of the natural world that surrounds us , with the unnatural world of flat opaque colors and letter based forms . constructing the image with subconscious gestures and shapes ,arranged and executed in a very conscious way, working on corresponding to the ideal of abstract art, the push and pull of contrasting elements. In the studio work they tried to retain the sensibility they have developed through working with graffiti in the outdoor setting , but at the same time try to create a new representation of the same energy.
Polinizadoras. With this wall Somadifusa alias Laura Ortiz/Soma wanted to highlight the work of those who regenerate the earth through sowing and specifically the value of the seed. The title of the mural will be Polinizadoras, which in Spanish means pollinators, this goes following the idea of giving importance to those who help the species last, which are not only people, but also the animals that have dispersed the seeds over time and how sometimes in the apparently less fertile places, life begins again.
Colombia
Laura Ortiz/Soma. Artist and illustrator From Bogotá, Colombia who searches in the drawing and painting to portray subjects related to territories, people's trades and traditions; and on another side introspective or personal subjects speaking to spectators through symbols that in many occasions are plants of the local environment. Highlights from her work the participation in different street art festivals and mingas carried out in different populations of Colombia and in other countries since 2016, some collective and individual exhibitions and work as independent in social projects related to conflict and environment.
Thiago’s work was inspired by the book Flora brasiliensis, which is still one of the largest and most complete documentation of plants ever made in history. Today more than 100 years later it is still current. Emperor Francisco I of Austria sent a scientific commission to Brazil, as a dowry to Emperor D. Pedro I for his marriage to his daughter, Archduchess Leopoldina, who has always been a supporter of research and also a very important figure in the independence of Brazil, which completes 200 years in 2022.
Brazil
From that Thiago researched plants of the Brazilian flora that became world famous mainly after the modern gardens of Burle Marx. I tried to orient myself by the palette that the festival proposed, and also not extrapolate in the colors so that the painting dialogues with the tones of Vienna.
Argentina/Brazil
Cosmic Kite. Working in the peripheral neighborhoods of the city of São Paulo Tec began to be inspired by the kites, a very common practice in those areas.
From there, he began to reproduce different types of kites on the asphalt, decorating the mountains on the edge of the city. For his artistic proposal he intented to take some of the culture here and mix it with what can happen in Vienna, creating an inevitable mixture of interpretations.
Strawtent. Anny Wass received her diploma in design and sculpture, as well as in photography. Since graduating in 2009, she has built a multidisciplinary practice ranging from object and painting to design and photography, characterized by material investigation and a passion for scale, color, and detail.
Austria
The series of works, in which the artist uses herself or her objects as pictorial material and multiple images of herself as building blocks, is the heart of her work. In these photographic self-presentations, the artist alternates between the roles of object and photographer and documents the performative process.
Austria
Power to the people. Gert Resinger works with a variety of media and materials. His works are created in a continuous process, intentionally or chaotically. He is inspired by social processes, literature as well as fashion, music and technology.
During his studies at the Academy of Applied Arts, his focus expanded from painting to objects, furniture and installations. Painting and design remain in the foreground, even with furniture – drawing is an important means of expression for Gert Resinger and often serves as a model.
In his work, humor, tragicomic and abysmal are a great drive to create things and express himself. Technical processes become part of the design. Gert Resinger likes the idea of people coming into physical contact with the work and becoming part of the artwork through use.
“I don’t want to be reduced to a certain cultural background, it cages me. I want to be open and think internationally through my art. I also do not want to be reduced into one artistic movement or style...I can’t ignore my heritage and life experiences, but I can choose my way of relating to it, and always and a new approach... I don’t believe in ‘A culture’, each person has his/her own culture, as in a family, where each member brings his or her own character, even though they all belong to the same family background. Culture is a personal thing, everything and anyone is culture... we all have points of view, which we share, and each one sees things from his/her point of view and perspective. Just as we two sit in one room, but each of us perceives it differently at that moment...”
Palestine
& other
Ruin & Skirl
Olivier Hölzl
Käthe Löffelmann
Ruin
