Global Graphica

The Super Happy Friends stencil in central Reykjavik, Icleand. Who are these guys? We’ve heard the SHF are responsible for a lot of street art and graffiti in the cool island capital. This picture was snapped in summer 2008, when we were in town for the Bjork and Sigur Ros concert for Nattura.

We love this sign at Reykjavik’s Keflavik International Airport. We love the fact that somebody thought about setting aside a space for people to find each other and explicitly labeling that space with a sign. We also love the choice of color, font and positioning, as well as the light. The airport is one of the best designed and modern we’ve seen anywhere in the world. The immigration passport-control and customs area has a spare aesthetic elegance and feels warms and soothing for the foreign visitor.

Exquisite skull-themed illustration wheat-paste street art on Crosby Street in SoHo, New York City.

Athens, like many Greek urban areas, is a city full of stray dogs and cats, so it’s fitting that we stumble upon street art images of dogs, as well as some other cute, pet-like (but unidentifiable) creatures in old historical center of the capital.

Dope graff by Tsisa on a narrow side street in the Plaka neighborhood, directly below the south face of the Acropolis, in Athens.

We recently returned from Athens, Greece, where we surprised at how vibrant the street art scene in the Greek capital. From our informal survey walking the streets of the city, it can be argued that Athens’ street art rivals Barcelona, Spain, itself one of the most exciting cities in the world for street art. IN the series of images below, there’s a wonderfully colorful graffiti painting for LIFO on the side of a building near Monastiraki, a major shopping, cultural and lifestyle crossroads near the famed Acropolis. LIFO is the moniker of the artist and the name of a local weekly magazine a la Time Out.

Street art on a roller-shutter in the action-packed Psyri neighborhood of central Athens, Greece. There are heaps and heaps of street art in this nabe, as well as in the adjacent Gazi and Kerameikos districts of the ancient Greek capital..

Wicked street art in Athens, Greece, mate.

Global Graphica was a little quiet for the better part of a couple of weeks while we were in Greece for vacation and “field research.” We had an awesome time in the Greek islands and Athens. We took in the culture, history, architecture and art. We enjoyed the beaches, food and drink. We were pleasantly surprised at how much street art there was in the capital (and beyond) and the quality of scene, which is attracting well-known artists (like Os Gemeos) from around the world to put up major artwork in Gazi / Technopolis and Kerameikos. We came back with tons of images, many of which we’ll be posting here on Global Graphica in the coming weeks and months ahead.

This example of sticker street art on Delancey Street, in New York City’s Lower East Side / SoHo area, does double duty as both political-cultural commentary on New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg and as homage-rip to artist Shepard Fairey and his iconic “Giant Has a Posse” image. The Yiddish “Oyvey” substitutes the usual “Obey” on Fairey’s famous stickers. Bloomberg’s high-contrast image is in place of wrestler Andre the Giant’s face. Brilliant, cheeky and well-executed.