The new paintings are of course very typically Banksy with each of them making some kind of comment on a social issue. Among them is a painting of the Houses of Parliament but instead of politicians it is populated with apes while in another painting there’s a young boy in a cap standing with his foot on the copyright sign.

It’s been a good year so far for the Bristol based artist. Not only has a new book been released about him but at a recent auction a collection of his works sold for an impressive £400,000.

Check out the new paintings above.

The new piece has been painted over the top of Eine’s previous work which simply read ‘Change’ and was created to commemorate the death of Tom Easton who was a victim of a stabbing in the area back in 2006.

This time around Eine has painted the words ‘Worth More’ onto the space for a piece that has been created in association with Flavasum Trust which warns young people about the dangers of carrying a weapon through the medium of art.

The news of the new mural comes just days after it was revealed that Lovebox goers could be in with the chance of winning a piece of Eine’s work as part of a street art project being put together by Nelly Duff. 

Image: Londonist

Fancy yourself as a bit of an artist do you? Well then why not get involed in this new competition from Boxpark and Let’s Be Brief, The Art of Winning.

Taking the Olympics as inspiration The Art Of Winning competition offers you the chance to get a poster that you have made feature in an exhibition at Boxpark. There are 14 places for posters ready and waiting for winners to show the public what the ‘art of winning’ looks like.

This Poster Design Competition Exhibition launch is on the 5^th July and it is open for entries now.

The exhibition of winning posters will of course be open to the public and the opening night will feature music from art and music label Earnest Endeavours with a live performance from The Insomniax.

On the night there will be the chance to win 3 signed prints from the exhibition and winners get a free framed version of their prized work.

To enter your poster and see the full brief go here.

Competition is open from 21st May – deadline 22^nd June 2012

‘…a polka-dot has the form of the sun, which is a symbol of the energy of the whole world and our living life, and also the form of the moon, which is calm. Round, soft, colorful, senseless and unknowing. Polka-dots become movement… Polka dots are a way to infinity.’ (Yayoi Kusama, Manhattan Suicide Addict, 1978)

Yayoi Kusama is undoubtedly both Japan’s most prominent and prolific living artist. Throughout her more than 60 year career Kusama has worked insatiably and indefatigably, developing a voraciously extensive body of work that encompasses painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, and performance based works as well as the large-scale installations for which she is best known.

The premise of this exhibition is to present a representative selection of Kusama’s work, focusing on those ‘moments when she first worked in particular idioms, showing them as they emerged and absorbed the artist’s full creative energies’.

On display in the first two rooms is an array of works on paper dating from the early 1950s. I liked these early examples of idiosyncratic experimentation, executed in a variety of media including, ink, pastel, watercolour, gouache and tempera, very much. Often featuring abstracted forms suggestive of natural phenomena such as eyes, eggs, seeds, stars and spermatozoa, these works recall both the microcosmic and the macrocosmic and in so doing, the surreal.  Kusama staged several solo exhibitions in the early to mid-1950s, initially in Matsumoto then in Tokyo. She also began to receive considerable critical acclaim, but was by now determined to leave Japan. In Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama, published last year, the artist recalled: ‘For art like mine- art that does battle at the border of life and death, questioning what we are and what it means to live and die- [Japan] was to small, too servile, too feudalistic and too scornful of women. My art needed a more unlimited freedom, and a wider world’.

Kusama arrived on the West Coast in November 1957 and moved to New York six months later.  The Infinity Net paintings displayed in room 3 see Kusama, the curators suggest, responding to abstract expressionism as they differ greatly from her previous style of work. Oil on canvas the Infinity Net paintings are characterised by their highly textured surfaces, created in an at once obsessive and meditative repetition of paint laden brushstrokes, and placid wash of bleached colour. Pacific Ocean (1960), a grey blue welter of scallop shaped crests of paint, is notable for its representation of supreme artistic stamina and serene quality; a contrastingly compulsive and calming creation.

The fourth room features the Accumulation sculptures, first exhibited in a group show alongside work by Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal and James Rosenquist at the Green Gallery in New York in 1962. The Accumulation sculptures and Compulsion Furniture works bristle with a proliferation of sewn and stuffed fabric phalluses, creating a surreal environment in which dream like obsessions are realised in the physical realm, boldly, brashly, brazenly visible and tactile. The same might be said of Kusama’s Food Obsession series consisting of dried macaroni covered clothing, conveying, one might argue as in the Sex Obsession series, attitudes of shame and disgust in the midst of excess.

In December 1963 Kusama exhibited Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show at the Gertrude Stein Gallery, New York, an immersive installation environment which consisted of a rowing boat encrusted with phallus like protrusions placed in a room whose walls, floor and ceiling were papered with black and white poster format reproductions of the sculpture as seen from above.  Tate recreates Aggregation in order to signal the beginning of yet another new and expansive mode for the artist in which the viewer cannot escape immersion in her idiosyncratic, emotional and psychologically charged visions. Whilst Kusama’s name may not for many be readily associated with the Pop Art movement, Aggregation, it is interesting to note, anticipates Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper by three years.

Kusama’s collages, displayed in room 7, insist on further comparisons and connections with both Pop Art and contemporary developments in minimal and conceptual creation.  Her United Skates of Arnica One Roller Bills constitute a far more imaginative, wittily jejune play on capitalism and the peculiarly American obsession with wealth creation, in my opinion, than Warhol’s silkscreened dollar bills of the same period. By the mid to late 1960s Kusama began to integrate photographs of herself into her photocollages and mixed media montages, in so doing visually situating herself, her reproducible, commodifiable  self, at the centre of her own artistic, endlessly repeating Kusamatrix.

Room 8 contains archival material relating to the artist’s 1968 film, Kusama’s Self-Obliteration.  Set to a score by pop-rock band The C.I.A. Change, Kusama’s self-produced film features the artist in rural upstate New York dressed in a spotty ensemble covering animals, plants, and finally a naked male body in polka dots and leaves. Later scenes depict hedonistic (drug induced?) happenings involving nude body painting and orgy-like encounters staged in fabricated environments. Also on display is Self-Obliteration No. 2 (1967), a watercolour, pen, pastel and photocollage on paper, featuring a spot clad Kusama leading a horse into a red polka dot filled foreground. Self-Obliteration No. 2 is reminiscent of Kusama’s Horse Play happening staged in Woodstock the same year.  Flyers for Kusama’s body and phallics festivals, as well copies of the newspaper she published entitled Kusama’s Orgy, Nudity, Love, Sex and Beauty for Adults over 21 are also exhibited in this room.

In 1973 Kusama returned to Japan. She returned to object making, beginning a series of mixed media works on paper intended in part as an elegy to Joseph Cornell, a great friend of the artist whose death the previous year had profoundly affected her. I particularly like Graves of the Unknown Soldiers (1977), apocalyptic black laced with traces of hell fire, red and jagged crags overlaid with circular jewel-like images of owl nests, flowers and shells.  Kusama’s transition to life back in Japan was troubled and in 1977 feeling physically and psychologically unstable, she voluntarily admitted herself to the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill that has remained her home ever since.

There she returned to the creation of sculptural forms, hand making small individual objects that when combined created large multi-part installations such as Heaven and Earth (1991), a rather uncanny and slightly unnerving piece whose flaccid phallic forms seem static only temporarily, threatening at any moment to begin fighting and flailing.

Room 11 features paintings dating from the 1980s and 1990s; psychedelic works in hot pink and vibrant shades of yellow and green writhing with a proliferation of snake/ spermatozoa-like forms reminiscent of the biological/astronomical imagery present in some of her earliest works on paper.

I’m Here, but Nothing is another of Kusama’s immersive environments, a darkened domestic interior littered with fluorescent polka dots. The room is unsettlingly vacant, filled only by the sound of the artist’s curious warblings. Kusama’s hallucinatory visual and aural reimagining of what the curators refer to as ‘bourgeois stasis’ is rendered soulless and surreal by such a restaging.

Kusama’s recent paintings are her largest to date. These vibrant, almost volcanic works tell wild and dislocated narratives using an idiosyncratically primal visual vocabulary, characteristic of her oeuvre.  Images of brilliantly wide eyes, single cell organisms and spermatozoa as well as dots, nets and the artist’s hieroglyphic self in side profile populate these powerfully kinetic, pulsating pieces.  The more visually complex paintings contain numerous small figures including doll like little girls, smiling dogs, pumpkins and blooming flowers.

The Infinity Mirror Room created specifically for this exhibition and the largest such installation Kusama has made to date is absolutely mesmeric, seeming truly to be ‘filled with the Brilliance of Life’.  The viewer is encouraged to suspend his or her sense of self and to accompany Kusama on her on-going, paradoxical journey of discovery through self-obliteration. I am most definitely a convert to the cult of Kusama.

Nicola Baird

Pavel Büchler, ‘NO NEW WORK’, Max Wigram Gallery on now until 16^th June

Nicola Baird

Jamie Shovlin, ‘Various Arrangements’, Haunch of Venison, until 26^th May

Nicola Baird

If you haven’t heard of Vandalog then chances are you should probably go on this tour. Vandalog are one of the leading international street art blogs, experts in the street art scene in London and abroad.

The tours that they put on not only show you where to see some of the best street art in the city, but where you can learn about the artists themselves, their process and stories that only street art insiders would know. The tours last about two hours and are a mix of outside art and street art galleries with talks from artists and curators along the way from Old Street to Liverpool Street Station.

Vandalog has been running for nearly three years acting as a great source for news, shows and works around the world when it comes to street art.

When: Every Saturday from 2pm- 4pm

Where: Meet at Old Street Underground Exit 4

Closest Tube: Old Street

Price: £10

Contact: Stephanie Keller  stephanie@vadalog.com to reserve a place

Moonrise Kingdom is the latest film from legendary director Wes Anderson and all the posters and images we’ve seen from it so far have been brilliant, in fact we didn’t actually think they could get any better, until now.

The posters come courtesy of Shortlist who asked artists such as Ben Whitesell, Matt Needle and Fran Asensio to recreate the posters for Moonrise Kingdom. The results of their hard work can be seen above and we think you’ll agree with us that they’re rather super.

What tools couldn’t you live without?

Glue Gun, HB pencils with erasers, Retractable pencils with erasers, Cutting mat, 10A Scalpels, Retractable scalpels, Metal rulers, Faber-Castell black PITT artist pens, and most of all my hands and eyes!

What inspires you?

I try to find inspiration in everything. The resources are limitless.

What motivates you?

Learning how to get better before worrying about getting older.

What would you be doing if it wasn’t art?

Idealistically – Wildlife conservationist

Realistically  – Carpenter

Nelly Duff  is the 

Unloved and destined for the scrapheap, Nelly Duff will be recycling old cars the best way she know how with the help of some of the worlds best street artists and they’ll all be ready for display come Lovebox.

Ben Eine is creating original artwork on steel, Matt Small will be working on a taxi bonnet and East London favourite Sweetoof’s roadworthy play on classical based imagery will prove an experience. Dan Hillier’s abstract splicing of Victoriana imagery from a distinctly British time gone by will also feature, along with Dr D’s playfully direct mode of social and political commentary, and the dream-like painting of Will Barras. These are artists of the highest calibre, with characteristically unpredictable processes. Together they will create 10 distinctly individual artworks set to steal the show, to celebrate a decade of Lovebox.

Nelly Duff will be bringing a bit of axel grease and urban debris from the very heart of East London to the area’s premier music event.

These artworks will be displayed for Lovebox’s 60,000 visitors from the heights of the trees throughout the 3 day extravaganza, running from 15-17th June 2012. Think trailing taillights, headlights hanging from branches and 10 car bonnets showcasing original artworks from the cream of the Street Art crop. These pieces will form the main focus of Nelly Duff’s hanging gallery, along with individual car parts for people to buy.

Visitors to the festival or the Nelly Duff website could win their very own ‘Art Car’, or bonnet!  EINE is producing a special ‘LOVE’ bumper sticker which can be purchased for £5. Customers will then automatically be entered into a prize draw to win an original painting by EINE on a car panel.

There will be gazebo around the ‘Art Cars’ alongside striking signage for a big prize draw, visitors will be invited to sit and hang out among the cars. Nelly Duff is happy to be bringing this unique experience to the Lovebox audience, which will resonate with those who are lucky enough to witness it.

Lovebox Festival will take place on June 15^th, 16^th and 17^th June 2012.