When Kenny Scharf was painting his mural—an orgy of candy-colored cartoon faces in various states of distortion—on the northwest corner of Houston and Bowery in downtown Manhattan, he said he wasn’t worried about graffiti writers painting over his piece, as they did to Shepard Fairey’s “May Day” mural at the same spot in July.
If you travel by rail between Berlin and Halle, Germany, and pay attention to the passing landscape, you will eventually set eyes on a 350-foot-long graffiti mural (obligatory football field metric: two and a third). It’s a series of detailed scenes: a laboratory overrun by rats, a shipping port under dark clouds, galleons fighting through rough waters and a giant octopus, and a cityscape at sunset. The graffiti name of the artist, MadC, is ubiquitous.
Twin brothers HOW and NOSM are on the move – constantly. Currently painting murals all over Rio de Janeiro, the graffiti artists return to their home base of New York very briefly before heading down to Miami at the end of the month to paint in Primary Flight, a mural project during Art Basel week.
Born in San Sebastiano, Spain, and raised in Dusseldorf, Germany, the brothers landed in New York in 1997, where they live and work (they are part of the . They paused just long enough to tell us what it’s like to be not only all-city, but all-world.
