MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Blu may be one of my favorite street artists working today. His work, as instantly identifiable by style as it is by sheer scale, has also been humming a high current through the world art net recently, culminatingin an invitation to do a piece on the side of the Tate Modern in London and a solo show at the Galleria Patricia Armocida in Milan, which opened last week.

Like a global graphic novel, Blu’s tenuously allegorical grotesques and often mythological figures appear on building-sized panels dispersed from Saõ Paulo to Berlin and from Nigeria to Palestine. There isn’t a narrative that binds them to be “read” together — at least not one I see — but each sketch is also a skit, a scene acted out in the borderlands of comedy and drama. A little bit of surreal life sliced out of a dreaming child’s acidic nightmare by a sure, clever surgeon.

The life that Blu gives his creations is what sets him apart most and nowhere is that life more evident than in the epic stop-animation above that he made last winter.

More Blu here.

Blu (June 18 - July 25, 2008)

Galleria Patricia Amocida

via Bazzini n°17, Milano

Wednesday, June 25, 8:00pm
Happy Ending Reading Series (Happy Ending Lounge, 302 Broome Street)

Amanda Stern’s Happy Ending Reading Series ends out Wednesday with readings from Marisa Silver (The God of War), Nicholas Dawidoff (The Crowd Sounds Happy), and Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There’d Be Cake) and music by Nina Katchadourian. Each author is asked to do one risky thing, and the musician to play one cover. Always a fun, smart time.

Thursday, June 26, 7:30pm
St. Mark’s Reading Series @ Solas Bar (232 E. 9th Street btw. 2nd and 3rd Aves)
Continuum 33 1/3rd Reading

Three authors from Continuum’s 33 1/3^rd series will read at Solas on Thursday: LD Beghtol (Magnetic Field’s 69 Love Songs), Franklin Bruno (Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces) and Elizabeth Vincentelli (Abba Gold).