New Year's Day walk (2/3)

Urban art in Zaragoza: 3/3

Urban art in Zaragoza: 2/3

Urban art in Zaragoza: 1/3

Just a few blocks from the apartment is an old neighborhood where demolished buildings have left walls exposed. This is the sixth year that the city and graffiti artists have collaborated in an "Asalto" (assault) of urban mural art, with guest artists and local artists leading workshops, creating new murals, and making us look in new ways at urban spaces otherwise seen as "vacant" or "unused."

Quinto Asalto: two birds by Roa (part 2)

Another internationally participant in the Quinto Asalto Urban Art festival in Zaragoza is the Belgian artist who goes by the ame Roa. You can see from his Flickr stream that he specializes in large-scale figures of animals and birds, done all in black with with lots of textural details of fur, feathers, scales. Sometimes they are alive, sometimes not, sometimes their bones or muscles or innards are showing.

Unurth has excellent photos of the four pieces he did in Zaragoza: a fish, a squirrel, a rabbit, and the two crows. I only saw the crows in person, but I was completely enamored. He has a tumblr site with more examples of his work.

Details:

Quinto Asalto: International Festival of Urban Art in Zaragoza, June 2010 (part one)

A few years ago, we discovered that there was a thriving graffiti/urban art community in Zaragoza, especially in the oldest part of the city called the "casco histórico" where old buildings in various states of disrepair are sometimes revealed when buildings next to them are knocked down to make way for new construction. We had a lot of fun looking for images to photograph; I blogged about our discovery of this event, called the "segundo asalto," here.

The first "asalto" happened in 2005, and was already an ambitious gathering of local and international artists. As is always the case, this kind of art is ephemeral; some pieces have painted over, but many have remained a part of the urban landscape, like this giant figure by Blu (see more pictures here) a few blocks from home (the sunglasses were added this year).

We had fun trying to locate all of the numbered figures to photograph.

This year was the fifth collective art party, called the "quinto asalto." The local hosts have documented the event with tons of pictures and links at their site "asaltoproducciones.es". You can find links to all the artists who participated, as well as a map.

This piece is one of the most colorful. I haven't identified the artist yet.

This one is by an artist with the French collective from Nantes, 100 pression .

Some stupendous photos of this event can be found here.

If you want to see more images of urban art in Spain, I recommend the blog "Escrito en la pared." Professional photographer and designer Rudy Alvarez, aka "Brazo de hierro," has an astonishing portfolio here that includes portraits and iconic images of the life of the urban artist. And a collection of images of street art worldwide is at Unurth; it has a great shot of a huge piece I was not able to photograph completely, by Malakkai and CNFSN.