Os Gêmeos are two twin brothers from São Paulo in Brazil. Os gêmeos actually translates to twins. Their artwork varies from casual graffiti to complicated murals. Their work has a very artistic touch to it and the characters in their work are often of a dreamlike appearance.
For more information and images try: WikiPedia, Lost Art, Interview of Os Gêmeos at: Art Crimes, Deitch Projects, Images on Flickr, We Make Money Not Art, Visual Resistance and Eyes On Brazil.
Below is a video of Os Gêmeos:
I enjoy print making as an artform. It is a great way to express yourself and I liked it long before I had heard about Stencils as a serious artform. Screen printing produces some amazing results. Screen prints are nomally found in galleries and some can get quite dear.
Virtue Ruins Beauty is a piece by an artist called Give Up. The images below are a paste up from an abandoned building in Houston, Texas. See link: Citynoise Website. I wanted to share it as an example of good streetart. It is an interesting idea to return the art found in galleries back to the street, so putting the prints into abandoned buildings, as opposed to bring the streetsart into the galleries or putting protective covers onto graffiti (as happened with a Banksy graffiti in Melbourne).
I love stencils and I think that the stencil is the modern reincarnation of the poster. The poster was a very powerful medium that became very popular in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s (Art Nouveau/Jugendstil). Some of the more famous artists using posters as a medium were Toulouse-Lautrec, Mucha, Steinlen and many others in Europe. Japan had proven to be highly influencual on the development of the poster as an art form.
Like the poster as an art form the stencil is dispensable and mostly short-lived. A stencil in a street art sense is a response to a political question, it is a satire on the state of art or just a beautiful or not-so-beautiful image. The fact that it is short-lived and a child of its day make it so attractive. Stencils are very graphic and can be very visual depending on the contrast and colour scheme (of the stencil and the wall).
I must admit that it scares me to see art critics getting too involved in street art. Seriously, once the establishment gets too involved in any movement it does kill the vibe and spirit of that movement. Get the establishment involved with all their definitions and dogma and you end up having many layers between the work and the viewer.
If you want to experience a good sculpture for example you want to be able to engage with it and one aspect of engaging with it means feeling it! Once a sculpture is placed in a museum it becomes less accessible (in a tactile sense). You might have heard of the case in Melbourne where a council went so far to install an acrylic protective cover on some street art. Sorry, I might rephrase that: not just some or any street art but on a piece by the almighty Banksy. True, I like Banksy and a lot of his pieces work for me, but street art is street art is street art is street art is street art is street art…
Below are some images from Melbourne’s backstreets and a few other selected pieces by 108 from Italy, Swoon from the US and Jef Aerosol from France.
victorbiola.wordpress.com 
