street art gallery

During our recent continental excursion, we came across many examples of painted images on the walls and doors of buildings, and this post features the best of these in Brussels, Cologne and Bonn.

brussels
The first photo is of a bronze dog cocking its leg against a street bollard:

…while the next photo reminds me of the tradition of found objects in art going back to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (which was actually a porcelain urinal). Both this and the previous photo were taken by Paula.

When I first saw the painting in the next photo, I noticed only the bottom part, because my eyes were focused at street level, but it’s far more amusing when you see the entire image:

The next image, also painted on the narrow, projecting side of a building, is even more quirky:

I don’t get most of the cultural references, but I’m bound to enquire about the relevance of Sherlock Holmes in this painting.

The next photo, which was taken close to the location of the previous painting, makes an important point in the ‘art or vandalism’ debate. This image is amusing, in my opinion, but the real vandalism was perpetrated by whoever has spray-painted the word ‘KADER’ and sundry squiggles over the painting.

The next image needs no further comment:

Finally, I’ve included three photos of images painted onto a wooden hoarding. The first photo shows a face painted at the corner created by two stretches of hoarding at right angles to each other. It looks as though it was painted some time ago, because it is now showing unmistakable signs of wear and tear.

This is what the hoarding looks like to the left:

…and to the right:

cologne
The first piece of street art that we encountered in Cologne was this one-eyed cat, which had been painted on the side of a telecommunications box:

We saw the next image as we arrived by train in Cologne. Unfortunately, it is impossible to photograph the entire painting, which stands above the flat roof of a single-storey structure that abuts the building on which the work has been painted. It shows a citadel being attacked by soldiers using a giant banana as a battering ram, backed up by a man with a bow and arrow and a second man with a catapult. There is also an artist with a brush in one hand and a palette in the other.

I’m not sure about the symbolism of this painting, but the word ‘INVESTOR’ is inscribed at the top of the round tower in the centre of the citadel, and the gate that the rammers are attacking bears a passing resemblance to the logo of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC):

The two faces in the next photo, which I took in a small park close to our hotel, may be crude, but I couldn’t resist including them in this collection:

In Continental Excursion, I included the painting of two faces on up-and-over garage doors. This is a group of three faces painted in a similar style next to the original two:

There was a second group of three faces to the left, but they were obscured by a parked car. However, the artwork continued around the corner to the left:

It’s something of a stretch to describe the next exhibit as ‘street art’, because we encountered this junkyard skeleton halfway across the Hohenzollern Bridge, which carries the main railway across the Rhine:

And here’s another skeleton, which has been painted onto the gable end of a house. The advertising hoardings at the bottom of the picture obscure a small part of the image:

When walking along a typical street in Cologne, I often noticed that some buildings were covered in graffiti and other artwork, but the majority were clean. I therefore conjecture that most of the graffiti/artwork that one sees has been painted with the permission of the buildings’ owners. This is a shop covered in well-known cartoon characters:

(although I can positively identify only Spiderman and Calvin & Hobbes).

The next image is my favourite. It appears to depict Cologne emerging from a fire hydrant. I don’t know how many of the buildings are meant to be identifiable, but for a casual visitor like me, only the Dom (cathedral) is unmistakable.

Roll-up doors are popular locations for artwork, and the next image supports my conjecture that whatever is painted on walls and doors is done with the consent of the owner. In this case, the text in the bottom right corner informs potential customers of the shop within of the shop’s opening hours:

Finally, this is a photo that I took as we were leaving Cologne by train:

bonn
We had only a couple of hours to explore Bonn, and you will never guess the subject of the first piece of street art we encountered:

That’s right! Ludwig von Beethoven. The pose and the facial expression match the best-known portrait of the great composer, but the facial features do not.

The sculpture seen in the next photo reminded me immediately of a yardang, a rock that has been sand-blasted into its present shape by desert winds. I took just the one photograph, but Paula took several, walking around the sculpture to view it from different angles. And, as a result, she noticed that there were many faces in profile (two can be seen in this photo):

The final contribution from Bonn is these two severed heads seen outside a Romanesque church. I have absolutely no idea what, if any, symbolism is involved here, but I do like the concept: