Talented street artists from around the world will bring a splash of colour to Aberdeen this spring for the debut of the Nuart Festival in Aberdeen.
Artists from Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Spain, Portugal and the UK have been announced to complete the line-up for the street art extravaganza, which will be held in the Granite City from Friday, April 14 to Sunday, April 16.
Renowned street artists Fintan Magee, Nipper, Add Fuel, M-City, Alice Pasquini, Jaune, Isaac Cordal and Martin Whatson complete an impressive roster of talent after Herakut, Julien de Casabianca and Robert Montgomery were announced by festival organisers last month.
Coming to the UK for the first time, the Nuart Festival provides a platform for national and international artists to showcase their work through a series of murals, installations, interventions, and temporary exhibitions.
There will also be an extensive programme of activity including talks, presentations, film screenings, workshops and a few surprises over the course of the Easter weekend.
As part of Nuart, the festival artists will also work alongside local artists to create a lasting impression in the city centre by brightening up neglected spaces with their work.
Adrian Watson, chief executive of Aberdeen Inspired, said: “We’re very proud to have secured an impressive and talented line-up of street artists for the Nuart Festival, and look forward to welcoming them from across the globe.
“The festival is held in Stavanger each year and the organisers were keen to work with us to bring it to the UK for the very first time so it’s a huge coup for it to be held in Aberdeen.
“It is an ambitious project which will give residents in the north-east and beyond the opportunity to engage with all of the work that will be done over the Easter weekend. Everyone involved in bringing the festival to Aberdeen have been working hard to make it a success and we’re looking forward to seeing colourful works of art pop up on walls across the city centre.”
Australian Fintan Magee is regarded as one of the world’s leading figurative street artists. His large-scale murals draw inspiration from cartoons, children’s books, nature and architecture, and highlight the extraordinary nature of everyday existence.
Nipper is a Bergen-based artist whose work focuses on social ideals of sharing, creativity and citizen-led communication in public space.
Add Fuel is a Portuguese artist who reinterprets the language of traditional tile design. His technique of revealing and obscuring surfaces beneath or on top of existing structures and walls creates a unique optical illusion effect.
Isaac Cordal is a Spanish artist who since 2006 has placed miniature sculptures in public places around the world as part of an on-going series called Cement Eclipses.
Made with cement and reproduced using silicone molds, Cordal’s figurines are arranged in scenes that capture the absurdity of human existence through the simple act of miniaturization and thoughtful placement.
At just 25cm tall, his characters can be found hiding among the city streets in gutters, atop buildings and bus shelters, on walls and in other unusual and unlikely places.
Mariusz Waras known professionally as M-City, is a Polish artist who is revered for his large-scale industrial themed murals.
One of Poland’s best known artists, M-City has worked on walls across the globe including several in Stavanger on previous trips to Nuart. His work involves piecing together hundreds of carefully cut stencils to create a coherent imagined cityscape, generally of mechanical and industrial objects.
Alice Pasquini’s artwork is seen not only on urban surfaces and walls, but also in galleries and museums in more than one hundred cities around the world.
Alice travels continuously and her preferred canvases are city walls. The Roman artist has developed different themes to her art, from narrating feminine vitality to manipulating the three-dimensional possibilities of her work.
Jaune is a stencil artist and urban interventionist from Brussels. 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.
In 2011, 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.
Martin Whatson is a Norwegian born and based stencil artist. After following graffiti and its development, he started his own stencil production in 2004.
Martin has a continuous urge to search for beauty in what is commonly dismissed as ugly, out of style or simply abandoned. He looks for inspirations in people, city landscapes, old buildings, graffiti, posters and decaying walls.