Advertising Transformations

Object on Object

OX is a French street artist who uses existing billboards and advertising infrastructure by removing the original adverts and cutting and pasting them back together to create new and often humorous works.

He first gained notoriety with the Frères Ripoulin collective in the 1980s and developed his reputation creating works on the streets of Paris and abroad.

OX's work can often be recognised by the use of simplified abstract forms and the interaction between the chosen location and its environment.

Magic Matches

Ella & Pitr are a French street art duo best known for their larger than life figures in a fairytale-like style. The real-life couple hails from Saint-Etienne, France, and have been working together since 2007.

You can find their Giants, a series of illustrated comic-book stylised characters, playfully snoozing their way around the globe, adorning rooftops, runways, homes, shipping containers and even fields.

For Ella & Pitr's contribution to the Nuart billboards project, they made a break from their usual large-scale works.

Here, they have realised two small figures in contrast to the monumental giants they painted elsewhere in the city.

Home for Nuart's billboard project

Australian multidisciplinary artist Ian Strange explores the cultural and social impact of the home in various cultures.

Seeing the home as a sacred object or environment, the artist chose a series of houses to represent this familiarity with a space we all share.

With HOME, Strange continues his exploration of architecture, space and the home. By crossing out and mark-making on top of the images the works portray visions of the home.

Strange's work for the Nuart billboards project was taken from his "Target" series of original artworks on found vintage photographs that were then reproduced as a large-scale billboard intervention.

Strange challenges preconceptions of such a space being one of safety or security.

This opens up a broader conversation about the correlation between the two, in a callback to his larger body of work that evokes a sense of disenfranchisement within the urban environment.

Slutt å Bore i Arktis / Stop Drilling in the Arctic

Dr.D tackles the notion that advertising – whether official or commercial – is a social pollutant.

With a decades-long background as a commercial billboard poster, the artist is well versed in the language and tools of advertising in public space and commonly uses wheat-pasted text and images to create his public interventions.

He has "doctored" everything from existing bus shelter advertisement to road signs and large-scale billboards throughout his career.

The artist's interventions regularly make minor changes to the existing visual language, catching the viewers off-guard with a disruptive and humorous impact.

For this intervention, the artist asserts a definitive no to the Norwegian government's plans to drill for oil in the Arctic.

La cage pres du ciel / The Cage Near the Sky

Canadian artist Sandra Chevrier creates contemporary pop art that merges painting and collage. In her most well-known series, The Cages, she combines hand-painted portraits of women with iconic imagery from the comic book world – only leaving the eyes and mouth unmasked.

In 2015, Chevrier was tasked with creating her debut outdoor mural and the inaugural work for the Nuart billboards project.

Entitled "La cage pres du ciel", the work depicts a pair of feminine eyes staring at the viewer on top of a collaged background of traditional comic book art.

Unlike conventional billboard takeovers, the Nuart billboards project is unique in being a permanent site for public art instead of a temporary intervention.

Chevrier's work creates a new kind of hero, contrasting the fantastical heroics and iconography of comic books with the harsher underlying tragedy of oppressed female identity and the exposed superficial illusion it conveys.

Chevrier's work creates a new kind of hero, contrasting the fantastical heroics and iconography of comic books with the harsher underlying tragedy of oppressed female identity and the exposed superficial illusion it conveys.

Game of Loans

Kennardphillipps is a collaboration between artists Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps, who have been working together since 2002 when they began producing art in response to the invasion of Iraq. Their practice seeks to confront war and power worldwide.

Their project for the Nuart billboards project in eastern Stavanger depicts a fictional bank note inscribed with monopoly, capitalism and "game of loans".

The duo produces work made for the street, the gallery, the internet, newspapers and magazines as a critical tool that connects to international movements for social and political change.

For their work on a temporary wall at Stavanger Cathedral in central Stavanger, the artists addressed prejudice in the media, juxtaposing an image of a demolished city with anti-immigrant British tabloid front pages.

In Humanity

PublicAdCampaign

Jordan Seiler is best-known for his long-term civil disobedience project, PublicAdCampaign, which seeks to challenge outdoor advertising's predominance in public space. His work frequently makes use of a minimalistic formal style with a focus on graphic shapes.

His contribution to the Nuart billboards project utilised augmented reality technology to bring the billboard to life in the digital space.

Using a specifically developed app, users could scroll through a selection of images and videos that were unlocked by holding their digital device in front of the image.

Seiler has visited Nuart on multiple occasions, contributing various takeovers to advertising boxes all over the city.

Scottish-born, London-based poet, artist, and sculptor Robert Montgomery is best known for his large typographic installations and site-specific public space poetry, often emphasised by fire and light.

When visiting Nuart, Robert focused on supporting the Refugees Welcome campaign with his visual poetry gracing various surfaces across the city.

He follows a tradition of conceptual art and is noticeable for bringing both text art and poetry to the streets.

Montgomery's work is instantly recognisable,  his often melancholic, though empowering words, regularly address urgent socio-political issues.

Unveiling Beauty

The Spanish-born, Berlin-based Vermibus is best-known for his modified advertising posters critiquing contemporary beauty standards.

The artist brought his haunting faces to the Nuart Festival in 2017, where he performed a series of advertising takeovers throughout the city centre.

Vermibus routinely collects advertising posters from the street to make up the raw material for his work in the studio. The artist then modifies the advertisements using solvents to partly erase the model's faces and brand logos.

Once the transformation is complete, he reintroduces the adverts back into their original context, hijacking their visibility to present his own subversive, anti-consumerist messages.

By subverting how human figures are represented in public space, Vermibus' interventions become part of a broader conversation of social significance by questioning who has the power and authority to communicate and create meaning in shared spaces.