After rocketing into the stratosphere of the underground art world in the past few years, the anonymous collaborative street art duo known only as FAILE is making huge waves across the pond with the debut of “Lost in Glimmering Shadows,” a show of ambitious multimedia work at London’s starmaking LAZARIDES GALLERY. Located in the Lilian Baylis Old School, a special offsite non-gallery venue chosen to maximize the impact of the show’s presentation, the vast array of large and huge-scale paintings and sculptures are radiant in their new home, owing much to gallery impresario STEVE LAZARIDES‘ knack for spectacle. Introducing a new Native American theme to their work, Faile are returning to their early aesthetic influences growing up in the Southwest by channeling appropriated Pop cultural renderings of American Indian culture into their trademark heavily layered work in a pointed commentary on “the expanse of contemporary commercialism at the expense of society’s connection with nature and spirit.” Explosive color is a unifying theme throughout the show, the focal point of which is a series of impressive new “collage” paintings, and carries through to the beautiful, carved 5-foot-tall Native American wooden prayer wheels engraved with a mix of Faile’s trademark Americana iconography, and the smaller wooden boxes bearing more of the same. More subdued were the round palette paintings that mimicked Native American pottery and baskets in both shape and pattern and interwoven with Faile’s graphic messaging. With prices ranging from $7,000—100,000 USD and work selling as fast as the gallery can take orders, it’s obvious that the world of street art is thus far proving recession proof amid the global economic meltdown. Londoners take note, the show is only on display until November 16th, so don’t sleep. HAVE A LOOK:

Photos by JEREMY GIBBS 

THE SPREAD: 

PAINTINGS: 

WOODEN PRAYER WHEELS: 

WOODEN BOXES: 

SCULPTURE & ROUND PALETTES:

FLAG OF OUR FATHERS: 

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 3:36 am and is filed under Graffiti, London, News, Openings, Street Art, art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.