Greek street artists visit London and put on a show in Dalston

Some of the Greece’s finest street artists got an outing in Dalston as part of the latest group show to be hosted by the popular BSMT Space gallery.

Featuring favourites of this blog, Argiris Ser and Simoni Fontana, the show also introduced us to Wild Drawing (WD) Street art, Cacao Rocks and Thisisopium.  The resultant group show celebrating Greek street art adds itself to a growing roster of street art inspired shows featuring artists from around the World at the BSMT Space.

We first came across Ser & Simoni a few years ago now, when they exhibited at the Moniker Art Fair, Ser produced a series of paintings giving his take on the Greek financial crisis which was and still is enveloping the country.  Since then the artists, who subsequently married, have been fairly frequent visitors to London with Simoni in 2015 having also appeared at the sadly now defunct Femme Fierce festival alongside other Greek artists Mariana Cute and Cleo43.

Simoni’s work remains delicate, her recognisable faces are hypnotic and stare out at you from the canvas.  Ser’s work couldn’t be any more different, his realm is the fantasical, his background is from the street but on the occasions they paint together the combination is magical.

Of the others WD or ‘Wild Drawing‘ street art catches the eye.  His work is usually to be seen painted large scale on the side of buildings but in the show he had produced some more subtle but no less impactful work.  Visitors to downtown Athens will be familiar with his large scale murals, his style a mixture of fantasy and abstract with humanity seeping through.

Thisisopium is a Greek artist based in London, his work is abstract and full of colour, full of symbolism and, according to his website, uses “nature and our detachment from it as a key-point to discuss consciousness and the human condition with references that range from primitivism to surrealism.”

Finally Cacao Rocks, based in Athens, is another abstract painter.  Inspired by hip hop and skateboard culture he is a multi-disciplinary artist moving from the world of graffiti art, to sculpture and installation and back around to painting.  As with the others his work in Athens can be seen all over the city at indeed the World.

The show is another success for the innovative BSMT Space which finds itself playing host to another internationally themed show with some of the World’s top talents.  Inside the gallery is also a mural created just for the show from Fontana.   One of her piercing faces it will be a shame when this gets painted over, as it must for the next time the space is used, so if anything just get down to see that before the show finishes because it will be just too late to do it after.

‘Paracosm’, the show celebrating Greek Street Art, is showing at the BSMT Space Gallery in Dalston from 16 February 2017 to 5 March 2017.  The gallery can be found at 5d Stoke Newington Road, Dalston, N168BH.  For another post on Greek street art have a look here.

Paracosm Gallery 

Argiris Ser

ThisisOpium