Here is a preview thanks to lesinrocks.com of a groundbreaking installation at the Palais de Tokyo “In the bowels of the Palace Secret”. Lek Sowat and Dem189 were invited to exhibit and install an insitu installation. It is not a surprise the artists chose a secondary spot that is not part of the exhibition space, choosing instead to create their installations in the rarely traveled corners of the building. They have transformed stairways and fire exits into a massive collaborative installation inviting scores of artists to come and paint. If you have seen the Mausolee project then you know that Lek and Sowat are not afraid of abandoned dark places, and the Palais de Tokyo’s hidden sections were the perfect canvas. Inviting artists to come and collaborate is also in tradition of their Mausolee project and has enabled generations of writers to come together on this project. It is this collaborative spirit that is rare with so many other artists, yet with Lek and Sowat it comes naturally. This is a preview and we hope to share more photo’s as they come out of this amazing project.
GF
Photo Hugo Vitrani
Photo Nibor Reiluos
Photo Hugo Vitrani
Photo Nibor Reiluos
Photo Nibor Reiluos
Photo Nibor Reiluos
Photo Nibor Reiluos
Photo Hugo Vitrani
Photo Hugo Vitrani
Photo Hugo Vitrani
Photo Hugo Vitrani
Photo Hugo Vitrani
Photo Hugo Vitrani
Photo Nibor Reiluos
Photo Nibor Reiluos
Lek Sowat, Dem189 In the bowels of the Palace Secret
Date: 07/12/2012 – 01/09/2013
Lek and Sowat seized the bowels of the Palais de Tokyo: secondary spaces are not intended to host exhibitions and are usually closed to the public. These places exist to ensure the proper functioning of the art center and meet safety standards. Their minimalist design recalls the time marked by precarious places and devices used by graffiti artists: brownfields, deposits trains.
Reproducing the processes deployed on the project “Mausoleum” (an artistic residency illegal a year in 40,000 m2 of ruins of a supermarket), Lek, and Sowat Dem189 invited artists from the graffiti to intervene in a wide staircase diving . An emergency exit, as a line of flight: the vanishing architectural leakage of a graffiti artist.
This project brings together artists from different generations and approaches: those who develop their practice in greenfield sites, to more radical involved only on trains and subways. Each artist brings its layout, its gestures, its history, its posture in which a collective ego and styles overlap, collide and coexist in a dark misty composition and stealth bombers, brush, pencil, chalk, and other materials recovered from the stocks of the institution.
Lek is part of the first generation of graffiti artists in Paris who cut his teeth on the mythical land between Chapel and Stalingrad, where the French street culture has emerged. Sowat is a Franco-American graffiti that evolved in environments Marseille and Los Angeles, inspired by one of the major figures of graffiti California, Chaz Bojorquez, who developed the “Cholo writing,” calligraphy born in the 1940 and to mark the territories of Latino gangs.
Lek Sowat and lead a common practice Urbex, investment places wasteland, full of history – not unlike the Palais de Tokyo. In their large-scale murals, typographic patterns traditionally used in graffiti, are led to a form of abstraction architecture.
With: Alexone, ALZO, AZYLE, BABS, BADHYPNOZ, BOM.K, BRUSK,BORE,BORIS, COKNEY,CYRIAK, DEM189, DRAN, DRAS,EMOY,GOMER,GRIS1,HOOBZ, INE, HONDA, HORFÉ, JAW, KAN KATRE, KEBOY, KENCE, KENO, LEK, LEGZ, MEKO, MR QUI, NEXT, NIBOR, OGRE, ONDE, OUTSIDER, PEAMS, RIZOTE, RUSTO, SAEYO, SATEN, SAMBRE, SETH, SINDE, SMOE,SODA, SIRIUS, SOWAT, SWIZ, TCHEKO, TEURK, VELVET, WO, WXYZ, XABY, ZOER JEAN
