Showing posts with label graffiti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label graffiti. Show all posts

Monday 31 July 2023

Banksy Deconstructs at First Exhibition Glasgow



He deconstructs art and is radical, surprising. Dismaland, anti-war, 

 

It’s easy to understand Banksy’s desire to have this first major show of his 25 years of art making at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) Glasgow (once the Royal Exchange) with the coned Duke of Wellington proudly outside – coned comically now for 40 years after the council gave up trying to remove the cone.

 

Glasgow is a challenging and vibrant place – a place of a multitude of music venues, both big and small, where impressive stone architecture sits side by side with glass modernism, acute poverty and impressive art and architecture – tall Rennie Mackintosh design, merchant city venues, westend wealth, Clyde ships (now mostly silent like past ghosts) and swaying walkways that connect north and south Glasgow; the meetings and protests at George Square, down Ingram street and along Nelson Mandela place.

 

Glasgow is very much about its people and street art makes sense in a city that won’t be silent.





We first enter a dark, enclosed space with flickering lights, sounds and movement to represent street life – rather than the usual quiet of art galleries. There’s Banksy’s anti-war images – throwing flowers and hearts. There are many images of children. 

For Brexit - 'VOTE LOVE'


Banksy early on realised  the power art activism and art as protest can make. He eventually realised that the backgrounds didn't matter on the walls, where space played an important part too.

It was important to be seen and out on the ordinary city streets. To express how we are lost at times and our inhumanity.
It's also a protest to art elitism. Towards the end of the exhibit he shows us how he shredded his girl with a heart image, after a bidder at Sotheby's bid 750K! One thing missing after occurs though - where is nature except in his bunch of flowers? 


Hope in humanity sits alongside despair here – can we forge new pathways? Often surprising, questioning, 


“The purpose of art is not to hold up a mirror to life but to take a hammer to challenge it"