Title: La Cage Entre Les Frontières

Edition of 295
Giclee with 18 Colour Screen Print On 300 Somerset paper

100 x 70 cm

Signed By The Artists and numbered.

2022.

Sandra Chevrier

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment which gave the women the right to vote in the USA, Sandra Chevrier collaborated with American street artist Shepard Fairey on the creation of a massive 12-story mural in Austin, Texas. Entitled « The Beauty of Liberty and Equality », the mural celebrates gender equality. It fuses both artists’ distinctive styles : it shows the character of Wonder Woman breaking a chain with her bare hands painted by Shepard Fairey and a massive portrait of a woman by Sandra Chevrier. The portrait is surrounded by multiple messages and images that evokes the history of women’s rights in the USA.

Since 2013 Sandra Chevrier’s has participated in numerous group and solo shows throughout the world and has painted murals for various street art festivals. In 2018 she has held her first museum solo exhibition. The exhibition entitled « Cages and the Allure of Freedom » was curated by Thinkspace Gallery at the Museum of Art and History of Lancaster (MOAH), California. In this exhibition Chevrier showcased large-scale sculptural works for the first time including three massive portraits alongside three life-sized, hand-painted busts complementing some of her largest two-dimensional acrylic on canvas works.

Martin Whatson (b.1984) is a Norwegian street artist best known for his calligraphic scribbles in grayscale voids. Over the past decade, Martin has developed an unmistakable aesthetic combining abstract movement with figurative stencilled compositions. His works can be seen to mirror the rise and fall of the streets, as he symbolically recreates the urban environment, then vandalises it to reveal his vibrant transformations.

Growing up in Oslo Norway, Martin was an active part of the emerging graffiti scene of the early 90s which at the time maintained zero tolerance. The physical architecture of the city was a constant inspiration, the elaboration and destruction of each generation contributing to the urban infrastructure. The same deconstructive processes can be seen in his creative influences of Jose Parla and Cy Twombly. In the early 2000s, this interest in layers became more literal with the introduction of stencils into his work. The evolution moved him closer to a simple yet effective aesthetic he believed could bridge the gap between the passion and spontaneity Graffiti held for him, with the fragility and transience of nature. This balance would come to define his creative approach.

With as many works on walls as on canvas and paper, the relationship between vulnerability and strength remains constant in each work. Delicate and organic characters feature; butterflies, ballerinas and animals all rendered in empty grayscale space. Almost stylised, these minimal figures are constructed of a few layers of hand-cut stencils. The ashen tones of the compositions and vacant backgrounds are reminiscent of his alternative canvases, the concrete. True to form, no gray space stays gray for long in Martins presence. whether immersing entirely or embellishing a detail, the images disappear beneath expressive, spray-painted strokes of assorted colours and textures.

Martins work features with festivals, projects and walls globally. His original work can be found in private collections and institutions with solo exhibitions featured in cities from Tokyo to LA, London to New York.