Interview with Victor Ash
A stencil of a floating astronaut in the Berlin suburb of Kreuzberg is considered the largest stencil mural worldwide. At 22 x 14 metres, renowned artist Victor Ash created the piece titled Astronaut Cosmonaut in 2007, using the idea of the astronaut as an icon of the Cold War. The figure focuses on the space race between America and the USSR, and “the idea of fighting for something that isn’t with soldiers, that isn’t here on Earth—it’s in another dimension. That’s the kind of idea that inspires me,” he mentioned back in 2011 in an interview with Arts As Cultural Diplomacy.
Born in Portugal and raised in Paris, Ash currently lives and works out of Copenhagen, making the required stop to many parts of the world for his various art projects. His work can be found on an eclectic array of surfaces like old air raid shelters in Germany, where you will see his stencil piece Look at me, look at you looming at 25 metres, depicting a man peeking down through his binoculars. Or, you can find his work on silos in Denmark titled Sea View, which consists of six, 70-meter high tubes with fish and sea creatures painted on them. His work, conceptually, is often a response to the area and condition around them, and more recently forming an aesthetic relationship with other design elements – more site specific.
Ash rose to prominence in the 1980s with Parisian graffiti collective BBC and has for the decades that followed produced art that matters. Apart from gracing many spaces around the world, his work has appeared in a number of publications including Søren Solkær’s book Surface, where he also graced the cover. Most recently Ash brought Full Moon, an eight metre mural to life in Berlin, where he reinforced his focus on a larger than life insight into what’s beyond us.
We spoke with Ash from his Copenhagen base about his intentions across urban environments, nature, identity and his most recent large-scale creations.
fluoro. You’ve been working in this industry for decades, starting with graffiti writing back in the 1980s. What made you start?
Victor Ash. Well when I was a teenager I was very much into electro funk music with most of it coming from the US and Kraftwerk the German band, and also hip hop, which got me right into the hip hop scene.
The hip hop scene from New York also included graffiti. I discovered graffiti in 1983/84. I was always a drawer, ever since I was a little kid, so as soon as I discovered graffiti I was attracted to start painting it in the streets. The exact same as what people did in New York, on the train, and I did it in Pairs for almost a decade. Then I started to paint on canvas in the 1990s.
f. What did you learn by painting on the streets that art school would never have taught you?
VA. Well I wish that I had gone to art school in a way because it would’ve been much faster with techniques that I could use now. I think that the advantage is that you have a lot of drive and self-confidence straight away.
When you work in the streets, when you paint in the streets you need a lot of energy and a taste for risk.
It was a lot of fun because it’s something that makes your life, and spices it up quite a bit as a teenager. I wouldn’t advise all teenagers to do illegal stuff like that, but for me it was a lot of fun. I had a lot of good times with other kids doing it. Somehow it also could’ve ruined my life; it could’ve meant jail, I could’ve been labeled a criminal. Many graffiti writers became known as criminals actually.
The chance came for me when people from the arts world approached me – this was after about eight or nine years of doing graffiti in the streets. Fashion designer Agnès B approached me and proposed an exhibit in her gallery and put me in another context, in a situation where I could actually live from my passion.
f. Your work is very much about urban environments, nature, people and identity. How does it translate differently in a gallery space then it would on the streets?
VA. The work in the gallery space is very different and so this is what I really tried to work on.
I tried to develop a style that was only for indoor exhibitions as it was not really possibly for me to take what I was doing in the streets and place it inside a gallery. It lost a lot.
I developed a style with the same technique, spray, which was much more refined and much more worked out. I, for example worked on each painting for two weeks to a month or more, which I never did on the street. In the street I worked on a piece for maybe, four-five hours. So it was really difficult to adapt actually, for the gallery.
It was not my wish at the start, it was something that I fell into, but I realised that if I wanted to be good at what I was doing in the gallery and exhibition space I had to challenge myself that was up to that level.
f. So much street art nowadays is presented in a gallery. How do you think it has changed the street art industry and street art as an art form?
VA. From my experience that was what I did actually. For 10 years from 1991 – 2001, I only exhibited inside. I only did works in the gallery environment or museums, but I missed the contact with the people. I had to go back to streets. That’s why I started to create large murals in 2001, to go back to the street.
I think it is completely different and street art is really not adapted for indoors straight away. Street art is great outside, but sometimes street art taken inside can be really, really bad from my point of view.
f. What do you aim to communicate? What’s the purpose of your work?
VA. When I started to create large murals again, my works reached a wider public so I worked with subjects concerning the general public.
I work a lot with environment, that from my point of view is very, very important. I work with society, teenagers, social integration, human interaction and stereotypes that deal with society in general. This is really all related to my own life, how I as a teenager evolved and integrated into society, in a European environment and how I moved around in the city. All these subjects are always in my work.
I work a lot with people who are… because of music they dress a certain way, or they find their identity in society with that sense, also nature, and how nature is integrated.
f. Your identity. Now you’re Portuguese born, Paris raised and Denmark based. How has this blend shaped and affected your work?
I used much of my time in Portugal as the relation to nature, because I was born in a small town in the north of Portugal but I never really lived there. When I was born there it was a dictatorship so my parents moved to Paris where we could have a better life, and I grew up in Paris as a Frenchman, so I am a Frenchman and Paris was like the big city, the European life that I use a lot in my work still. I used to go out in the center of Paris and lot and in the subway in the trains, that was the Europe side of my work.
And then Denmark, Scandinavia, is like the mix of both. A little city here in Copenhagen, it is a city but is very green, it’s very related to nature, people are very aware of nature here in Scandinavia. In their aesthetics it’s very pure, it’s design, architecture, and that’s what I integrate into my work, the Scandinavian refinement. Simplicity. Minimalism.
f. Is there something you’d like to create in the future?
VA. There’s many. At the moment what I am working on is with space, and again that’s because of the astronaut in Berlin. I am working with making very huge pictures of the moon in Berlin. The recent piece of the eight meter moon is very in your face. I want to continue my work with a series of planets like that. It can be Saturn or Mars etc. I want to express what’s in front of us. That’s nature. Bigger than earth. I want to do this in large murals.
f. Do you have selected spaces in Berlin at the moment?
VA. I get a lot of emails from people around Europe. I only accept if it’s really interesting, and is a space that inspires me. It has to be a space that is appropriate to the work I want to do in that space. Very often people send me pictures of spaces, compared to the space I find a work to do in the locations.
For example, I worked with well renowned architect Bjarke Ingels on a project here in Copenhagen [see top image]. He created this design, with apartments on top, and the parking is external and not underground. For the parking space I painted these types of cars with animals on top. It was very site specific. It was because of the parking and then on top there is nature… very green spaces.
f. What have you been working on?
VA. I’ve just travelled to South Africa, to Johannesburg, to take part in a group show, which was curated by a friend who has selected a panel of artists to comment on the everyday news. We already did this a few years ago in New York at the PS1 (MoMa PS1). I think this is the third time I have participated, because I also did it in Berlin.
It took place at Museum of African Design (MOAD) in Johannesburg and is currently still on show.
I was there for a week where I had to produce a piece of work daily.
f. How do you go about creating these pieces in such a short amount of time? What’s the process?
VA. My media is very varied, people they think of me very often as a painter, but I very often do a lot of other works also, and for this project [at MOAD] I mostly looked into using collages. The works needed to be created in this space and fast, and the best technique was collage.
f. Have you been working in collage for a long while or is this a rare instance?
VA. No I use it once in a while, but actually, many of my works are actually collages because they are pictures then I put them together and paint them.
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Ash’s work can be experienced at the exhibit titled #ULTRACONTEMPORARY #EMERGENCYART #AFRICA, which is taking place at MOAD, Johannesburg, South Africa until Sunday 31 July 2016. Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, the exhibit forms part of the Emergency Room family of works that has traveled to 10 countries, including MoMA PS1.
The work of Ash is a finely tuned art form, which he will continue to create in cities and spaces around the globe. Stay tuned for updates from the artist.
Interview: Audrey Bugeja, Managing Editor, fluoro.
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