Street Sm(ART)

I recently attended the opening of Robin Rhode's first solo exhibition in South Africa in over a decade... at the Stevenson Gallery in Woodstock, Cape Town. Besides being incredibly impressed the work as a whole, I was drawn to two pieces in particular (my passion being hair and identities) and the symbolism was profound.

Images via http://ex-chamber-memo5.seesaa.net/article/314202759.html

Rhode is a Cape Town born, Jo'burg raised, Berlin based artist who uses accessible material such as charcoal, chalk and paint to create simplistic shapes that form narratives as an interrogation of urban youth culture and arguably the many sub-cultures that have influenced him from graffitti to hip hop. Fusing mediums of performance, movement, street art, animation, sculpture and photography, he creates evolving images that question identity, space, power and play in an abstract illusionist form.

Image via http://www.lehmannmaupin.com

Through his work, Rhode transforms public spaces into dreamlike works of art: 

"there is this new democracy that allows 

individuals to see and understand public space and

the self differently"

In his latest exhibition, he questions space and the ability for art to interact with its participants and issues of accessibility within art.  He worked with the Lalela Project and asked a group of children to use oversized crayons to draw and colour shapes he'd constructed on the gallery wall.  

His work Paries Pictus is on at the Stevenson Gallery until 1 June 2013