Add Fuel is a Portugese artist who reinterprets the language of traditional tile design, in particular the Portuguese azulejo (glazed tiles).
His technique of revealing and obscuring surfaces beneath or on top of existing structures and walls creates a unique optical illusion effect. From a distance his vector-based or stencil works appear to be recreating traditional motifs but are in fact brimming with pop and contemporary art references. On closer inspection it's possible to discover a hidden world filled with humor and rendered with a masterful attention to detail. At the core of his practice is this desire to encourage the viewer to think about the history and heritage that lies beneath the facades and pavements of our cities.
To contextualize his street pieces, Add Fuel researches traditional patterns from the region in which he is working. For his participation in Nuart Festival he will work with traditional ‘Rosemaling’ patterns taken from the Rogaland region.
Axel Void (born Alejandro Hugo Dorda Mevs) was introduced to graffiti at the age of 13 - an experience which has strongly influenced his forms of expression and the conception of his artworks. Today, he is part of a generation of young painters who derive their dynamics from graffiti culture and urban art but are also strongly influenced by classical painting and drawing.
Born in Miami to a Haitian mother and a Spanish father, and raised in Spain from the age of three, Axel Void has studied at Contemporary Art institutions and Fine Art schools in Cádiz, Granada and Sevilla, where he remained active until moving to Berlin and then Miami in 2013, where he currently resides.
His 'Mediocre' series of murals around the world depicted local daily life filtered through selected representations from the media. Most recently, he has created a series of site-specific artworks that portray quotidian life, called the ‘Gray series’. These are large-scale artworks derived from narrative stories that reach beyond the boundaries of their immediate surroundings as opposed to what simply fits into the site’s context.
Eron is a Rome-born artist and one of the best-known exponents of Italian graffiti and street art. Although academically trained at the city’s Scuola d’Arte di Urbino, Eron had been practicing graffiti since the age of fifteen. After several years of illegal activity, he developed a recognizable style that combined both his formal art background and love of unsanctioned street work.
Eron blends his paintings into the natural features of a wall or object to create seemingly fleeting figurative visions. His highly-evocative works border on optical illusions inspired by the perceptual phenomenon known as pareidolia (when the mind perceives a pattern where none actually exists). One of his most iconic artworks is a “trompe l’oeil” created on the ceiling of the church of San Martino in Rimini, Italy, titled Forever and ever ... for ever and ever (2010).
He has participated in many individual and collective shows throughout Italy and abroad. He has had solo shows at Museo d’Arte della Città di Ravenna; White Room Gallery, Capri; Binz & Krämer Gallery, Cologne; LC Gallery, Berlin; Ego Gallery, Lugano; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Franceschi, Riccione; Mondo Bizzarro Gallery, Rome; and Arte Due Gallery, Milan, among others.
Eron’s work has been included in group shows at Italian Cultural Institute, New York; MACRO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma; Museo d’Arte Moderna Bologna; Art Temporary Museum, Bari; Galerie Binz & Kramer, Koln; Museo d’Arte Moderna, El Cairo; and Chelsea Art Museum, New York.
German artist Evol uses a multi-layered stencil technique to transform electrical boxes and street fixtures into miniature architectural models.
Born in Heilbronn, Germany, he attended the Kuopio Acadamy of Arts and Crafts in Finland and has a degree in product design from HFG Schwäbisch Gmünd in Germany. His gallery work includes installations and paintings on reclaimed cardboard, where tears, marks, and folds in the material are incorporated into his compositions as part of the buildings’ facades.
Evol is interested in depicting the urban lives of ordinary people and believes that the character and history of any space is manifest on its surface. Many of his works are narrative or suggestive of the turbulent history of Berlin, where he currently lives and works. These ‘cities within cities’ are rendered so precisely it is often hard to tell whether or not you’re not looking at real buildings when viewing his work in photographs.
Jaune is a stencil artist and urban interventionist from Brussels, Belgium. His work is based on the paradox between the visible and the invisible, with sanitation workers the main protagonists in his humorous installations and paintings - an idea that was born from his own experience working in the profession.
Despite performing an important public service in garish fluorescent clothing, Jaune observed that he and his colleagues existed in the background of our urban environment, becoming almost invisible to the average person. It was in 2011 that he decided to free these characters from their roles by symbolically placing them in ever more absurd and whimsical scenarios in and around the city streets.
Those who were supposed to keep the world tidy have become harbingers of chaos. At the same time, Jaune encourages us re-evalaute our relationship with the individuals represented in his work.
Jaune’s participation comes as part of a newly-formed collaboration with Belgium’s The Crystal Ship Festival, which saw Nuart invited to curate Biancoshock (IT) and Isaac Cordal (ES) into The Crystal Ship’s inaugural festival in April of this year. Each artist undertook a four-day residency on the streets of Ostend and in this same spirit Jaune will receive the freedom of Stavanger to produce a series of installations and paintings.
About the partnership, The Crystal Ship curator Bjørn Van Poucke, said
“Nuart’s impact on our vision and goals, both on a creative and professional level, is not to be underestimated. Although The Crystal Ship and Nuart have their own unique identities, we find common ground in the fact that we look to curate artists in a way that avoids pigeonholing the Street Art genre.
Nuart has always been the cool kid on the block, a festival we have looked up to for over a decade, and it is a true honour to work alongside them.”
Born in 1985 in Lismore, Australia and encouraged by his parents to draw from a young age, Fintan Magee began painting full time in 2009 and has since established himself as one of the world’s leading figurative street artists.
Magee’s large-scale murals create a visual circus of scattered imagery and styles, drawing inspiration from cartoons, children’s books, nature and architecture. Transporting the viewer beyond mundane routines and expectations into a world of unexpected beauty and chaotic balance, his paintings highlight the extraordinary nature of our everyday existence.
"Childhood memories and personal experiences inform my work but I also like to link personal experience to broader social issues like climate change or class struggle. In some works I feel like I'm telling stories that I don’t yet fully understand however, which brings an element of chaos or the subliminal."
Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen (born 1986) is a self-taught artist whose creative production revolves around classic figurative painting.
Henrik explores nihilism, existentialism, longing and loneliness, juxtaposed against a fragile beauty. His subject matter is often presented in a dream or limbo-like state with elements of surrealism. His focus on atmospheres rather than narratives and realism leaves his paintings open for many interpretations.
For his participation in Nuart, Henrik will be painting only his second outdoor mural, and by far his largest to date.
Hyuro is an Argentinian born street and urban artist best known for her powerful compositions that blend socio-politics with a distinctly surrealist sensibility.
Hyuro has carved out a reputation for addressing prevalent social and political issues in her work. The characters she depicts are often those suffering under predominantly patriarchal and capitalistic systems.
By submitting reflections on both individual and collective identities, and questioning the conditions of freedom as the fundamental and inalienable rights of the person, Hyuro has become one of the most influential female artists working in public space.
Originally working on canvas, Hyuro took to the streets after striking up a friendship with Spanish street artist Escif. However, she continues to produce watercolour paintings and drawings regularly and has presented solo exhibitions at galleries worldwide.
Hyuro currently lives and works in Valencia, Spain.
Even before graduating from California State University with a Masters in Fine Art, Jeff Gillette was making collages featuring accoutrements of the Disney culture. Recently he was brought to the world’s attention through his participation in Banksy’s 2015 Bemusement Park spectacular, Dismaland, even being credited as an inspiration for the show in some quarters.
Despite the seriousness of his observations, Gillette sees ironic and amusing juxtapositions that occur when Disney, corporate logos, and pop icons from consumer culture shows up as building blocks of shanty settlement construction. His works reflect these ironies as well as add a playful dimension to art historical relationships: the addition of pop cultural references serving to sharpen the satirical stance of the message in his work, where everything is otherwise entropic and terrifying.
For Gillette, there is something ineffable behind the obviously chaotic and desperate appearance of these places — a universality of human spirit and a strange beauty which comes out of the necessity and raw honesty of the will to survive: "When I visit third-world slums and landfills I take lots of photographs and videos, painting from them in my garage studio in Orange County…within earshot of the nightly Disneyland firework shows."
Kennardphillipps is a collaboration between artists Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps, who have been working together since 2002 when they began producing art in response to the invasion of Iraq. Their practice has since evolved to confront power and war across the globe.
The work they produce is made for the street, the gallery, the internet, newspapers and magazines as a critical tool that connects to international movements for social and political change. They also lead workshops that help to develop people's skills and ability to express their thoughts about what is happening in the world through visual means.
In their own words, "We don’t see the work as separate to social and political movements that are confronting established political and economic systems. We see it as part of those movements; the visual arm of protest. We want it to be used by people as a part of their own activism, not just as pictures on the wall to contemplate."
MTO is a French artist best-known for his grey scaled photorealistic portraits. Recently his work has taken a new direction, exploring the intersection between street art, public space and augmented reality.
Having experienced the vibrant graffiti scene of Barcelona as a youngster, MTO became inspired to produce work on the streets and moved to Berlin in 2006 to pursue his art. Over the course of the next seven years MTO established himself as a fine photorealistic painter, producing distinctive portraits with a trademark red outline and palette that forms both part of the artwork and his signature.
MTO’s recent work includes a series of large-scale murals that, when documented, create a "bug” or “hack” in Google Earth or Google Street View. His first Google “hack” – painted in Gaeta, Italy - has been active since July 2015. The second, painted in the Loures municipality of Lisbon in 2015, is yet to “enter the system” as it has not, to date, been captured by the Google Street cars that pass through our city’s streets at regular intervals. For Nuart, MTO will continue the series with an ambitious "trompe l'oeil" or three-dimensional outdoor installation in Stavanger.
Nipper is a Bergen-based artist whose work focuses on social ideals of sharing, creativity and citizen-led communication in public space.
For Nuart 2016 Nipper will present his Mission Directives project, which creates alternative zones of communication through the installation of temporary and interactive artworks in and around city centres. By questioning who has the power and authority to communicate messages and create meaning in our shared spaces - and the public’s relationship to their urban environment - Mission Directives becomes part of a broader conversation of social significance.
Each of Nipper’s Mission Directives come in one of the following three forms:
1. Gift : an artwork for the finder to take with them
2. Special Order : a Gift for the finder to take with them along with instructions to perform a specific artistic action in public space
3. Special Invitation : a Gift for the finder to take with them along with an invitation to make a new Mission Directive using the materials provided (marker pen, spray paint, acrylic, pencil, paper and/or stencil).
The hash-tag #missiondirectives provides hints to the locations of his artworks, which will be situated in three key areas of the city: Storhaug in the east part of the city, the city centre, and along Pedersgata (the main artery that connects the two).
Robert Montgomery has been called a vandal, a street artist, a post-Situationist, a punk artist and the 'poets Banksy'. He follows a tradition of conceptual art and is noticeable for bringing a poetic voice to the discourse of text art. Poetic texts form the basis of his billboard pieces, light pieces (recycled sunlight poems), woodcuts and watercolours.
Montgomery showed at the 2011 Venice Biennale and was selected to represent the UK at the first biennale in India - The Kochi-Muziris Biennale - in December 2012. He has also had solo exhibitions at venues in Europe and in Asia, including major outdoor light installations on the site of the old US Air Force base at Tempelhof. The first monograph of his work was published by Distanz, Berlin in 2015.
Originally from Scotland, Montgomery studied at Edinburgh College of Art and then in the core program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He has lived in London since 1999.
SpY’s work involves creating dialogue in public space – transforming or replicating urban elements in order to interfere in their communicative codes. The bulk of his production comes from observing the city and its component parts - not as inert elements but as a palette of materials overflowing with possibilities. Careful attention to the context of each piece and a con-structive, rather than invasive approach, characterizes his work.
Working exclusively in the public space, SpY’s interventions act as a parenthesis to the inertia of the urban environment. For this reason, he privileges chance encounters between spectators and his artwork over exhibiting in galleries.
Describing his work as a conversation between artist and environment, the passer-by and the piece, SpY aims to incite reflection and, ultimately, the creative development of the urban environment.