Departure

I recently had the chance to paint my biggest mural to date for Urban Nation Berlin.

The wall has the size of 40 by 16meters and was painted in 8 days with my good friend Sket185 as an assistant.

Text by Urban Nation, Pictures by Nika Kramer:

The new mural by BustArt at Artpark Tegel is entitled “Departure” and picks up a current topic: the upcoming closure of Tegel Airport. Locally close to the airport, the residents around Neheimer Strasse 4 can now look forward to a new ONE WALL, which – certainly with a little wink – symbolizes the past with air traffic and the future without it.

Jan Sauerwald, director of the URBAN NATION museum and curator of the ONE WALL programme, was able to acquire the Swiss artist BustArt for the ONE WALL at Artpark Tegel. For more than twenty years, BustArt has hardly ever put the spray can down. Starting his artistic career in the late 1990s with classic graffiti, the neo-pop artist found increasing inspiration in figures and quotations from American and European comic and popular culture. With his artworks he creates fantastic worlds, which, precisely through the comic worlds – from Donald Duck to Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse to the superheroes of the Marvel comics – evoke memories of our own childhood, but still establish a socio-cultural reference to current issues. With his characteristic style mix of paste-up, sampling and graffiti he has created his own term or rather a sub-genre: Graffiti Pop!

His latest work at Artpark Tegel focuses on the nearby Berlin-Tegel airport “Otto Lilienthal”, which will be shut down this year. The pilot depicted here, with his gaze directed upwards, taken from American comic strips from the 1960s, could symbolize the still predominant heavy air traffic in the sky, which is a severe burden on the residents in their daily lives in this district. Or is it a searching gaze looking for something that will soon disappear? Instead of aircraft noise, Tegel will soon be filled with the chirping of birds.

In any case, the current ONE WALL by BustArt stands for a historical change in this neighbourhood. The familiar is noticeably outshone by the new. Just as the depicted hand on the spray can seems to draw new lines, colours and shapes on the mural, life and living at Artpark Tegel will change in the near future.

“With his detailed works, BustArt leads us to the roots of graffiti and the graffiti movement and thus creates an enigmatic and multi-layered preoccupation with the visual and cultural codes of this art genre and Western popular culture. He conducts a kind of laboratory or aesthetic field research in the field of signs, superheroes and characters. As a result of this exploration, we are confronted with dizzying pictorial creations in which the mix of styles and quotations as well as the process of appropriation also becomes visually clear. This year, the works of the artists in our ONE WALL programme have dealt strongly with the theme of illustration in popular and street art culture. This is one reason for the artist’s invitation to design a facade for the URBAN NATION programme this year.” – Jan Sauerwald, director of the URBAN NATION museum and curator of the ONE WALL programme.

The ONE WALL by BustArt is located at Artpark Tegel, Neheimer Strasse 4, Berlin-Tegel.

click here to see more Pictures.