Hamburg, part II: street art

Continuing the visit to Hamburg that I started on the previous post.

One of the things that I really enjoyed in Hamburg was the huge quantity and quality of street art. From sculptures to wall painting. Vivid colors, alive images and emotional effects. What more can you ask from art?

The style, inspiration, technic of what one can find in the streets varies a lot, although some things do have some resemblance of style. I wonder if the two next pieces are from the same artist.

It's hard for me to name this as graffiti, a word that is mostly used to describe the badly done inscriptions on walls with no real insight, no deep meaning, no relevance, no art. So I prefer to name this as frescoes or paintings.

Of course I am probably completely wrong and those two paintings and they are made by two very different artists.

In one of the wall a Die Die My Darling in a possible (?) reference to the punk horror band The Misfits. It's also a great music so do enjoy it.

After seeing that the music was in my mind for quite a while…

In the end all this art form is even more temporary than the usual painting and sculptures. Most of it is done in old and abandon buildings and a city with the such dynamism as Hamburg will feel the pressure to replace those building with even more office blocks. With luck maybe the facade of those new building could integrate the art presented in the existing ones but somehow I don't believe that will happen.

Sometimes you can also find interesting advertising. Here we can see a real estate agency asking the people in the street if their house is too small, inviting them to jump into their web site in search for something new. Then the site is well layed out and easy to use (well... I'm using google translation to actually understand the site as my German is too basic for more than getting food and drinks at a bar).

I'll just end with two more frescoes that I enjoyed for different reasons.

The first one I think portraits Mahalasa, one of the eight avatars of Vishnu, that I find really nice because of the feelings when watching the painting. It bring a certain sense of harmony and relaxation that were most welcome by me. I had after all been walking for some three or four hours and resting, even just by imagining it, was well deserved.

Polytheist or even monotheist where the deity has several facets somehow feel more open to accept other people as they are. Or so it seams to me while I try to understand how can the three biggest religions that currently exist on this small planet fight so much when, to my understanding, they all have the same god as central piece of their dogma and diverge only on the messengers from that deity.

The other painting is a question: "Should I?".

It's up to us, as observers, to try and figure out what is the action that should or should not be taken and by doing so we project our own uncertainties into the drawing.

Now… Should you?