Gemma Briggs tracks urban art's ever-growing cred and talks with the local artists behind the spray can.
Tel Aviv's street artists are giving the city personality, making it beautiful, and weirding us out as we walk down the road. They are invisible creators whose art is the most visible there is – at least, until the municipality comes along, armed with rollers and gray paint.
If you walk around the city with your eyes open, you are sure to come by some street art and, if you happen to be in the Florentin neighborhood in the south of the city, you’ll see some of the best.
We set out to find out more about the anonymous artists behind Tel Aviv's most infamous street paintings. We were surprised to discover what a mixed bunch they are – in terms of their lifestyles, attitudes and success. Some work full-time by day, turning into their spray can-shaking selves at night; some have embarked on international artistic careers; and some have ambivalent, even negative, attitudes towards traditional art galleries.
Know Hope
“As a concept [street art] intrigues me. It really changed my idea of the creative process, what art is and who it is made for.”
The name-cum-request “Know Hope” is well known all over Tel Aviv. Perhaps because it’s written all over the walls of the White City. But, it is the striking character featured in his sad and beautiful images that has really made Know Hope the best-known darling of the city’s street art scene.
For the past eight years, Know Hope’s work has focused on one, unnamed figure that represents the human vulnerability that is an enduring theme of his artwork. “My work deals with a narrative, but not necessarily a linear narrative. It allows the spectator to develop a long-term relationship with this character,” he says. “The character is like an everyman. It’s neither male nor female… and [it’s] raceless.”
The California-born 30-year-old, who didn’t go to art school, says he has been making art his whole life, and has been doing projects on the street since 2005.
Balancing his artwork on Tel Aviv’s streets with a successful career as an artist exhibiting in galleries all over the world, in the past eight years, Know Hope has had solo shows in Tel Aviv, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto and Rome (and you’ll also find his work adorning the streets of these cities). He has also participated in a long list of group shows, including a 2007 project with graffiti artist Banksy on Israel’s most notorious wall – the West Bank separation barrier.
Asked about the differences between exhibiting in a gallery and creating art for the street, Know Hope, who lives in Tel Aviv, says: “Outside, there is so much more happening; the artwork becomes a detail of the larger scheme, makes it more humble. In a gallery, it’s a vacuum.”
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Foma
“The neighbors in south Tel Aviv like it when we paint [in the street]. We get people inviting us in for coffee.”
Foma’s street art currently has two directions: paintings that are mainly self-portraits, making up “a personal diary”; and posters – featuring a sinister black and white photograph of her wearing a mask, with red, hand-painted phrases daubed over the top. The phrases include remarks, written in Hebrew, such as “Why aren’t you smiling?” and “Such legs!”
“I call it my little campaign against casual sexual harassment,” Foma says, adding that the phrases reflect the kind of offhand, sexist comments that guys can throw at girls in the street. Unlike her other work, Foma’s feminist posters are unsigned – making them faceless and disturbing, in the same way that casual sexual harassment can be faceless and disturbing. Foma (the suitably sexless word is the name of a former beloved pet hamster) says her next project will focus on the Hebrew word “cusit” (a bizarrely acceptable term for a hot girl based on a slang word for “vagina”).
Preferring to keep her artistic persona completely separate, Foma is reluctant to talk about her other work – in the fashion industry. (She has her own brand.) She studied fashion at Ramat Gan’s Shenkar College and started doing street art in 2007, when she graduated. “I wanted to do something more expressive,” she says. “You can’t really express yourself in fashion – it’s too commercial.”
Originally from Moscow, the 30-year-old grew up in Ma’aleh Adumim. She has participated in several group shows, here and abroad, but says: “I don’t feel the need to present my work in a closed space because I can do my work on the street.” Foma adds: “I think street art is beautiful … When you see it, it stops and makes you think, it makes you sad, it grosses you out – it changes your daily routine.”
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Dede
“I don’t force [my art] on people. If they like it they will see it. It’s the opposite of advertisements.”
Dede heads out onto the streets of the city almost every night to make his precise, graphic art or to look for the next location. “I’m searching for the right corner, and the right color, and comparing my image to the size of the wall,” he says.
The 34-year-old, originally from Petah Tikva, went to art school and works full-time as a graphic designer (though for obvious reasons he’s reluctant to say where. “There’s a complete separation from my daylife and my nightlife,” he says, adding that his workmates have no idea about his can-shaking alter ego.)
Asked about how his artwork would translate to a gallery, he says: “I hate it, the way people act in a gallery, the way they look at my work in a gallery. Galleries have contacted me about shows … white walls, nice spaces – it’s not for me.”
Dede’s street art started out as “pure vandalism,” in his own words, when he found a half-empty spray can in the street when he was 12. “I just wanted to go to my school and add some color to a gray wall,” he says.
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Zero Cents
“You could never transfer the cracks in walls to the studio.”
Zero Cents’ street art is eclectic – from figures with multiple eyes or breasts to religious iconography. He draws inspiration from almost anywhere, “and I get bored fast,” he says.
The 30-year-old, originally from New Jersey, makes use of iconic images and words polluted with various meanings (if you see the word “Jesus” written back-to-front – he’s your man).
Zero Cents started out eight or nine years ago, painting freight trains and highway spaces in New Jersey, and says that, when he came to Israel eleven years ago, the work of fellow street artists Klone and Know Hope on the Tel Aviv streets “pushed me forward.” Now he makes a living as an artist, living and working in his Tel Aviv studio, and he views his studio work as a completely separate project from his street paintings. He’s had exhibitions in Berlin, Vienna, California, New York, Los Angeles and St. Petersburg.
“Because my grades were so bad,” he says, he didn’t get accepted into art school in the States. “I’m so glad: I haven’t seen anyone who went to art school that creates art that moves me. I think it destroys their creativity."
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Klone
“Israel is not a place I feel I belong to 100 percent… but [painting on the street] made me feel at home – like when you put up a painting in your home."
Klone, who immigrated to Israel from the Ukraine when he was 11, creates surreal characters – part human, part animal – that are somewhere on the cute-scary spectrum. He refers to them as “the next step in evolution,” and as “predators,” but makes a distinction between the destruction wrought on the world by humans, compared to animal predators merely trying to survive.
A well-respected veteran of the Tel Aviv street art scene, 33-year-old Klone has been painting the streets of this city for 17 years. “At first, [I did graffiti] just to put my name and show my existence,” he says. “I’m not a kid anymore; now I want to put light on different themes than myself.”
With street art, he adds, “you’re making free, accessible art, replacing commercials and putting up art that anyone can relate to. It’s not elitist, it’s not something locked in a museum.”
Largely self-taught, Klone quit art school in the second of a four-year course and moved into his own studio. He now makes a living from his art. His first full-fledged solo show (entitled “Keep On Dreaming”) was at a hangar in south Tel Aviv’s Florentin neighborhood – an ethereal site-specific installation, featuring huge images of his human/animals, and a waterfall of paper boats cascading down from a towering sculpture like a large birdhouse.
“I don’t see a reason not to do both [street art and selling works]. It’s just another way of spreading your work around,” he says. “I think the best approach is painting in the street. I feel more free.”
Klone has a reputation for being particularly tenacious in the battle against the municipality (which, according to all sources, has stepped up its campaign to remove/paint over street art and graffiti). He describes himself as “obsessive” and says: “When a painting disappears it just drives me to paint more.”
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