In August this year, the Berlin-based art association THE ART UNION was invited to co-curate the main project of the second Artmossphere Biennale in Moscow having the opportunity to present the work of three great contemporary urban artists: Pablo Benzo (Chile), Mario Mankey (Spain) and Johannes Mundinger (Germany).
During the course of three weeks Benzo, Mundinger and Mankey produced a completely new body of work on site that goes beyond two-dimensionality creating a series of sculptures and installations. The outcome was shown at the major group show at Moscow’s Manege Central Exhibition Hall.

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Johannes Mundinger born in 1982 in Offenburg, Germany, has been an important actor in the Berlin based urban art scene since 2011 when he, after he finished his studies in Münster and Brussels, decided to move to Berlin and take part in the blooming street art and urban art scene there.
Mundinger’s work appeals to the sensuousness of painting depicting his subjects in an almost raw and brutish manner with a highly textural and expressive brushwork, always “flirting” with conceptual ideas like the work presented earlier this year at Urban Spree gallery (covered).
His contribution to this year’s Artmossphere consisted in a series of paintings and ‘caged’ in a temple-like structure inside the gallery space.

 

Pablo Benzo, whose work we got a glimpse of a few days ago with Willow Waltz, his latest exhibition in Berlin at BC Gallery, is a Chilean painter, Graphic Designer, Illustrator living and working in Berlin since 2013. Coming from a graffiti background he eventually developed a genuine interest in fine arts finding recently a new passion in oil painting.
Characterised by a unique surrealist style, Pablo Benzo creates landscapes where enigmatic creatures, sleepy plants and objects are mixed with geometrical shapes and set up against empty spaces. His shapes, plants and creatures seem to suspended in time and space, adding a mysterious touch to each of his works.


Like Johannes Mundinger and Pablo Benzo, Mario Mankey, born in Valencia, Spain in 1985, decided to challenge himself and move to Berlin where he currently lives and works, and where he seems to have found his own distinctive voice.
His work combines diverse elements of comics, animation, graffiti, abstraction, as well as
In his paintings Mankey contemplates social topics such as human behaviours he finds disturbing and social issues such as hierarchies, male chauvinism, global warming, racism, respect for the environment, and impulsive human behaviour. He aims to create controversy, to awaken our senses and mind and incentivise the viewer to reflect about those issues.

http://artmossphere.ru/
http://the-art-union.de/

Images by The Art Union

Author: Fran

Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.