Sixeart

In the first commission to use the iconic river façade of Tate Modern, the gallery will present the work of six internationally acclaimed artists, whose work is intricately linked to the urban environment. Street Art at Tate Modern opens on 23 May and is the first major public museum display of Street Art in London.

All six artists are represented in major collections around the world and regularly shown in gallery exhibitions and biennales but their work began in public urban spaces and remains indebted to Street Art and graffiti traditions. The artists are: Blu from Bologna, Italy; the artist collective Faile from New York, USA; JR from Paris, France; Nunca and Os Gemeos, both from Sao Paulo, Brazil and Sixeart from Barcelona, Spain.

Street Art at Tate Modern brings to the fore an important aspect of current art practice and one that has influenced acclaimed artists, including Basquiat and Picasso. Although the term Street Art has been used since the late Seventies, the work, by its very nature, is in constant flux and hard to categorise. Broadly speaking the term has come to define the more visual and engaging urban art as opposed to text-based graffiti and tagging.

The work of Sixeart (Barcelona) mixes psychedelic abstraction with comic book inspired figuration. His work pays visual reference to Surrealist artists such as Joan Miró. Similar to Miró, Sixeart’s work has a childlike innocence that is combined with a almost hallucinogenic sense of second sight. His gestural and painterly works are often large scale although he does also work in sculpture, on canvas and with screen prints.

More info: www.tate.org.uk