ART CART NYC PRESENTS HELLBENT AT IDEAS CITY ON MAY 4, 2013
Art Cart NYC is proud to announce its participation in the New Museum’s Ideas City Streetfest, taking place on May 4, 2013 from 11 am- 6 pm on Houston and Chrystie St. on the Lower East Side.
For this year’s festival, Art Cart will present the latest iteration of Hellbent’s Mix Tape series. A continuation of the artist’s desire to incorporate craft and folk culture into urban art, this body of workis characterized by vibrant colors and complex patterns that slash across the surfaces they cover, from paper to public walls. It plays with the conventions of traditional color theory in the way pure pigment and decorative markings are fashioned in electric geometric arrangements. The mesmerizing designs are a contemporary nod to the practice of trompe l’oeil; though the configurations appear to be collaged wallpaper, the ornamental lace motifs are in fact painted to give the flat surface a sense of depth and history.
Hellbent got his start wheatpasting confrontational slogans such as “We Live in an Economic Totalitarian State” around Athens, Georgia. When he moved to New York in 2000 he ventured further into street-based art, and in 2005 he adopted the name Hellbent from Richard Hell, the influential instigator of punk in the 1970s. In addition to wheatpaste, Hellbent experimented with rollers, cans, and adhesives, but soon settled on making hand carved wood plaques. He depicted predatory animals and jawbones in front of delicate floral stencils, imagery intended to counter the machismo typically associated with graffiti. The Mix Tape series evolved from these plaques; by weaving together the tape used to designate the strips of color when spraying, the artist shifted his attention to the backgrounds as they eclipsed the central figures and became elaborate abstract fields.
Hellbent’s plaques and murals can be found throughout New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Zurich, Glasgow, and Paris, as well as in Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo’s book Street Art New York (2010).
Download a PDF of our press release here.
