Beast (street artist)

Beast is an Italian contemporary artist.^[1][2].

The political element is evident in Beast's work,^[3] even in pieces that depict celebrities such as Ivanka Trump.^[4] Beast has produced public artworks that portray some of the most powerful political figures in the world, including Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama in a tet-a-tet,^[5] Donald Trump,^[6] Angela Merkel,^[7] along with others, such as Marine Le Pen,^[8] Alexis Tsipras^[9] and Jean-Claude Juncker.^[10]

Beast is using the technique of photo manipulation^[11] to create his works and the methods of wheat pasting and billboard hijacking^[12] to place his works in the public sphere. His public artworks have been captured in a number of cities across the globe, including Milan^[13], London, Tokyo, New York, Brussels, Berlin, and a number of other European cities.^[14]

In a DumbWall interview, Beast stated^[15] "Sometimes people do not recognize my pictures as a personal project, they think it’s just another guerrilla campaign pasted on a wall. It sounds like a typical Coen’s plot, a struggle between what it is true and what wants to seem true", letting open the possibility of not using this medium in order to make his artworks more realistic or more believable, but due to a potential fluency in this medium.

Jerome Catz' guide "Street Art: Le Guide"^[16] and Nicholas Ganz guide "Street Messages"^[17] have included some of Beast's creations. Public Art Festival ^{[18][19][20][21]}, Tokyo International Art Fair^[22], Oxford International Art Fair^[23], Grenoble Street Art Festival^[24] and CityLeaks Urban Art Festival^[25], are some of the cultural frameworks that have showcased the artworks of the Italian public artist.

References