Friendly Monsters: Fefe Talavera’s Street Art Project for the Deutsche Bank Towers
October 10, 2013
She’s one of the few female stars of the Brazilian street art scene. Fefe Talavera made her name with her large-scale “Monster Paintings”—gigantic figures of animals and dragons in the streets of her native city São Paulo. This fall, Talavera’s friendly monsters can also be experienced in Frankfurt, when Deutsche Bank makes the entrance portal of the Deutsche Bank Towers available for the exhibition project Street Art Brazil to show one of the “fabulous” works of the 1979-born artist.
This year, Brazil will also be the center of attention of the city’s art and cultural program as honorary guest of the Frankfurt Book Fair. In keeping with this, the Schirn Kunsthalle presents the many sides of Brazilian graffiti art in Street Art Brazil. Numerous artists from São Paulo and other cities in Brazil are invited to put their work on the façade of the Schirn and a variety of other places in the city of Frankfurt.
Due to a tremendous abundance of techniques and styles, the Brazilian street art scene is regarded as one of the richest worldwide. Already as a teenager, Talavera was interested in this extremely creative subculture. Prior to the ban on ads in 2006, the billboards and posters that covered São Paulo provided the material for her works. Today, Talavera prints the 3-D advertising letters, which show parallels to the tags and throw ups of graffiti culture, and joins them together to form large-scale collages. Her figures recall the brilliantly colored “alebrijes” or papier-mâché figures the Mexican artist Pedro Linares, inspired by fabulous dreams, created in 1936 and that are part of folk art there today. Talavera’s “monsters” give her the opportunity to lend expression to her fears and aggression. And they’ve brought the artist respect, not only in São Paulo: today, her monsters can be seen on façades and urban architecture all around the globe.
Street Art Brazil
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
9/5 – 10/27/2013
Source: db-artmag.com