Claudia Walde Livres

Once upon a time, illegal graffiti and street art were modest in scale, hastily created in hours or even minutes and destroyed just as quickly by authorities, vandals, or the weather. Now, however, architects, urban planners, and development companies have begun to support the creation of large murals, allowing street artists and graffiti artists to make carefully planned, more permanent works, sometimes covering entire buildings, and adding a whole new visual dimension to the world’s cities. For this spectacular volume, Claudia Walde, whose own recent 1,800-square-foot, brilliantly colored mural on the Alte Messe, Leipzig, was created in just one grueling week of work, has selected more than 200 of the best XXL mural works from around the world and profiled thirty artists who pioneered this trend. Working in dangerous conditions, hundreds of yards above the ground, yet always keenly aware of the viewer’s perspective from street level, these new street muralists are as fearless and technically skilled as they are brilliant and creative. With exclusive commentary from the practitioners as well as detailed information about their planning, methods, challenges, and inspirations, Mural XXL also includes a map identifying exciting murals around the world.

A worldwide survey of one of the biggest trends in street paper works of art glued to a city's surfaces. Classic graffiti lives. But this essential book reveals how street art is continually renewing itself and concludes with a look into the future. For some forty years, city streets have been home to the modern graffiti movement, and now there is a fresh creative twist. Walls, phone booths, curbs, traffic signs―in cities around the world public surfaces are adorned with hand-painted or hand-crafted posters and stickers. Claudia Walde, aka Mad C and herself a graffiti artist, traveled the globe from Philadelphia to Prague, Barcelona to Berlin, to meet the great names in street art and to find the creative custodians of the new sticker cities. More than eighty artists are represented, with images chosen from over 7,000 examples. Mad C first covers the scene's history, including Shepard Fairey's Obey Giant propaganda campaign, Blek le Rat's stencil graffiti, and Revs's sensational sticker flood in New York City in the 1990s. Her documentation of the contemporary scene includes fascinating insights into the techniques used by today's Swoon and her amazing cut-outs, Invader's ceramic mosaics, and Above's wooden arrows. 317 illustrations, 308 in color

Classic graffiti lettering and experimental typographical forms lie at the heart of street culture and have long inspired designers in many different fields. But graffiti artists, who tend to paint the same letters of their tag again and again, rarely design complete alphabets. Claudia Walde has spent over two years collecting alphabets by 154 artists from 30 countries with a view to showing the many different styles and approaches to lettering within the graffiti and street art cultures. All of the artists have roots in graffiti. Some are world renowned such as 123 Klan (Canada), Faith47 (South Africa) and Hera (Germany); others are lesser known or only now starting to emerge. Each artist received the same brief: to design all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet within the limits of a single page of the book. How they approached this task and selected the media with which to express their ideas was entirely up to them. The results are a fascinating insight into the creative process.

Dieser reich illustrierte Bildband bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über einen rasant wachsenden urbanen Trend: Murals, spektakuläre Wandgraffitis in Übergröße. Diese aufwendigen und farbenfrohen Kunstwerke sprühen vor Kreativität und verwandeln ganze Stadtviertel. Der Band stellt 30 international bekannte Street-Artists vor und dokumentiert mit über 250 beeindruckenden Fotografien, wie sie mit ihren großformatigen Murals Städte weltweit erobern. Eine Weltkarte im Anhang zeigt die Standorte der eindrucksvollsten Beispiele – von Paris und Lissabon bis Rio und Johannesburg. Die Künstler erzählen die Geschichten hinter ihren Werken und gewähren Einblicke in die technischen und planerischen Herausforderungen, die sie meistern. Ihre Einfallsreichtum und Professionalität im Umgang mit Farben, Formen und großen Flächen werden weltweit geschätzt. Stadtplaner, Architekten und Unternehmen beauftragen sie zunehmend, Städte in coole Outdoor-Galerien zu verwandeln. Diese Auftragsarbeiten sind langlebiger als klassische Graffitis und ideal für Entdecker dieses urbanen Trends. Der Bildband enthält zwei sechsseitige Ausklappseiten im XXL-Format und eine Weltkarte der spektakulärsten Murals.