For the second edition of UPAW, the Principality of Monaco welcomed many artists, visitors and art collectors. The press was there, as well as local and national television media. The event was the main topic on social media for 3 days in Monaco. Artists, visitors, enthusiasts, all wanted to share this special moment in an exceptional site. The city posted the announcements of the event on its walls, and the Tourist Office participated in the promotion of the event.
Catalogs announcing the new edition were freely available in all strategic places of the city, such as lobbies of prestigious hotels, chic restaurants, and trendy bars in order to promote the event, partners, and the auction.
Prince Albert II gave the honor of attending the event and talk to the artists about their work. Just like the previous year, UPAW made it a point to support a cause by donating the net proceeds of the auction of 25,000 euros to the Fondation Prince Albert II to support one of their projects for the preservation of our Planet.
DAZE ELLIS
MADC
SHOE
KASHINK
HUGE
XAVIER MAGALDI
BELI
JULIEN COLOMBIER
REMI ROUGH
MR ONE TEAS
DAZE (USA)
New York is the city of Chris DAZE Ellis. Student at Art Design High School in 1976, he was, at that time, transposing his art on subway cars. Later on, dedicated to his career, he participated along with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring to an exhibition at the Mudd club in 1981. Nowadays, he is presenting his work in galleries around the world including Monaco in 1989 and 1993. He has quickly achieved great success overseas. His art is found in prestigious collections such as MoMA New York, Brooklyn Museum, Ludwig Museum in Germany or Museum Groningen in The Netherlands.
Daze is inspired by his experience, his own encounters, his memories, without forgetting his graffiti signature. His unique career in the world of American graffiti earned him to be chosen as a graffiti consultant by Baz Luhrmann for the Netflix series "The Get Down".
Follow him here: @dazeworldnyc
MADC (Germany)
Mad C was born as Claudia Walde in Germany in 1980. As a teenager, she began her career with spray painting and became one of the best street artists in the world. She holds degrees in Graphic Design from two universities and published three books about street art. Her canvases are exhibited in galeries around the world. Mad C was invited to paint murals for Sinkka Museum in Finland, at Wynwood in Miami and by the prestigious Mural Arts Program in Philadelphia. Mad C’s style finds its roots in graffiti art, resulting in vividly colored, dynamic calligraphy and transparency.
Her unique use of color, composition and layering are perfectly paired with the spontaneously and fast painted lines of the calligrapher.
Follow her here: @mad_c1
SHOE (The Netherlands )
Niels Shoe Meulman is a visual artist, known for his gestural paintings that reveal vivid traces of graffiti and calligraphy. He revolutionized the art of writing when he initiated the Calligraffiti movement, claiming “a word is an image and writing is painting”. Being a graffiti pioneer from Amsterdam, Shoe worked with New York graffiti precursors like Dondi White, Rammellzee and Keith Haring in the 1980s. Equally influenced by the great painters of Abstract Expressionism, he gradually found his own way to translate street attitude to gallery walls.
Experimenting within the traditional medium of paint-on-canvas, but also unafraid to venture into new realms like conceptual installations and poetry, Niels "Shoe" Meulman keeps pushing the limits of contemporary Urban style.
Follow him here: @nielsshoemeulman
KASHINK (France)
KASHINK is one of the few women artists very active in urban art; she lives in Paris. His work questions aesthetic codes, the definition of identity. Either by celebrating the diversity of humanity or by thumbing her nose at social norms, KASHINK sees herself as an activist. Since 2013, she wears a mustache drawn on top of her lips every day like two eyeliner lines. For the artist, it is as much an artistic stance to shake up the aesthetic as a sociological experiment that creates social ties around profound questions such as beauty, femininity, norms or freedom.
For about twelve years, her work has developed particularly in the street art, she paints walls and exposes her work abroad, gets requests for private orders and travels often for festivals and exhibitions in the United States, Canada and in many European countries.
Follow her here @kashink1
BELI (Monaco)
Italian born in Monaco, Belinda Bussotti a.k.a. BELI is a multifaceted artist who practices with talent painting, art photography and sculpture. Although street graffiti is not her specialty, she does not hesitate to put herself in danger when it comes to joining causes and raising awareness on issues that are dear to her, such as human rights, women, but also oceans and the planet into which the humanity is crunching without measuring its disastrous consequences.
Her commitment to the environment began in 2009, triggered by a film, « The end of the line ». Its first painted wall at the entrance of the bay of Villefranche sur Mer in 2014 was a warning cry on shark finning, still relevant. She stood out as a strong advocate for oceans & sharks via a personal exhibition at the Monaco Museum of Ocean Science « Shark & ​​Art » in 2013-2014 and the annual exhibition « On Sharks & Humanity » which travelled as far away as Moscow (Ekaterina Foundation) and Beijing (National Museum of China) in 2015. Several endangered species are gradually joining her collection « Beautiful Alive », such as a seahorse made of bronze displayed on the seaside in Cagnes sur Mer since June 2016. Her large bronzes of fins and seahorses were recently exhibited in Miami during Art Basel (2017) and Las Vegas (2018). If a film could trigger such a desire to inform and act, her wish is that her works in their turn make their way to awaken consciences.
Follow her here" @belindabussottibeli
HUGE (Sweden)
Daniel Fahlströms a.k.a. Huge is an artist who perfectly masters the work of the spray paint. He started painting graffiti in the mid-80s and then developed a Hyperealist style work. Today, he works in his studio in Älta near Stockholm. He participates in numerous art festivals around the world and produces impressive frescoes. His 3D « Heliumstyle graffiti » style is a testament to his mastery of the art of graffiti. A promising talent of his generation, he uses any occasion to express himself: he paints on walls, canvases, buses and all surfaces that can enhance his painting.
Follow him here: @hugeart
XAVIER MAGALDI
(Switzerland)
Xavier Magaldi lives and works in Geneva. He discovered graffiti at the end of the 80s. It is the work on the characters that interests him particularly. After a few years of wild-style torturing letters, he switched to free-style and « machines ». This is a style that is mainly found in Barcelona where he painted for many summers. It is these moments of free art and pure creation that pushed him to go to the canvas. Today he keeps on developing the abstract and mechanical sides. Because of his watchmaking profession, precision, geometry and technical drawing are part of his work. He is at the same time nourished by the cubism of the 20s, for the geometrical thought, and the machinism preached by the Italian futurists.
The paintings and sculptures of Xavier Magaldi take root in this quest for the materialization of time. In 2013, he created a new movement inspired from the graffiti called « MecaFuturism ».
Follow him here: @xaviermagaldi
JULIEN COLOMBIER
(France)
Julien Colombier is a painter whose early career was strongly influenced by the world of graffiti. Inspired by Japanese art, Matisse and Keith Haring, he developed his universe and adopted the vocabulary of nature in its entire splendor. His works transport us in the middle of lush tropical forests. His plant motifs were quickly spotted by the world of luxury and earned him prestigious collaborations (Cartier, Chanel, Pierre Frey, Diptyque…). Since 2008, he is achieving great success in galleries (Europe, USA and Japan).
Follow him here: @juliencolombier
REMI ROUGH (UK)
Remi Rough, born in London in 1971, sees post graffiti as a space for experimentation around color and geometry. He actively participated in the 1980s and 90s to develop the graffiti scene in the streets of London under the pseudonym Rough. Little by little, he pushes his art towards quasi-abstract deformations and thus begins to break away from his colleagues. His first exhibition was held in 1989, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that attention was drawn on his studio work, resolutely mature and highly successful.
Either working on canvas, paper, wood or on building facades, Remi Rough plays with equilibriums and perspectives using highly contrasting color palettes. Evolving towards an assumed minimalism, he joins the graffuturism movement launched by Poesia in 2010 and redefines the limits of contemporary graffiti in its most abstract tendencies. Today, Remi Rough is exhibited internationally and his art is enriched by various collaborations.
Follow him here: @remirough
MR. ONE TEAS (Monaco)
Mr. OneTeas started graffiti in 2005. Self-taught, he develops his style through travels, meetings and exchanges, leaving his mark on the streets of major international cities. His work focuses on planned obsolescence by giving another life to materials and consumer objects of the past while illustrating the evils of our society. He draws his inspiration from the media, political and cultural environments. By diverting images and the news, he offers us his critical vision of society, marked by humour and originality.
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In 2019, he produced his first museum retrospective at the Galerie Lympia, a former prison in Nice, with the exhibition “Reality Show 2.0” dealing with various ills of current society, by putting the viewer face to face with many excesses of our reality. Follow him here: @mroneteas
