As soon as I saw these spray painted cardboard panels by German street artist EVOL I knew I had to dedicate a post to them. Currently being shown at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in New York, in EVOL’s first solo exhibition in the United States, the exhibition Repeat Offender features stenciled works on cardboard and metal as well as a series of photographic print editions documenting Caspar David Friedrich Stadt, a 2009 installation project in a former slaughter house in Dresden, Germany. These cardboard paintings depict abandoned cityscapes, with the damaged cardboard representing the neglected quality of the low-income housing in Berlin. EVOL achieves extremely convincing architectural illusions through the clever incorporation of torn edges, dents, tape fragments, box markings and exposed corrugated textures. The result is a portrayal of the urban decay that has resulted from the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but remembered before the gentrification of the city, as EVOL describes, “clean surfaces don’t speak to me, so recording these marks is a process of visually remembering the charm of a place that will soon be painted over”.
Images: This is Colossal
