Nearly 130 years old, Les Bains was originally a municipal bath house where folks like Marcel Proust like to take a steam. From the late 1970s, it transformed (via a design by a young Philippe Stark) into one of the key venues for new wave and rock acts and celebrity scenesters. Joy Division played Les Bains. But by May 2010, the structure of the space was deemed too dangerous for occupation. While its owner Jean-Pierre Marois jumps into the restoration—the plan is to make it private residences/hotel/club called La Societe Des Bains—he temporarily turned the space into a canvas for fifty urban artists (Futura, Mr. Brainwash, Jef Aerosol, Mosko et associés, L'Atlas and so many more) commissioned by gallerist Magda Danysz. While the building remains closed to the public, one can still browse an incredible ranges of works graving the walls of the building via the Les Bains website's artist-a-day blog. The contrasting approaches make for a buzzy contemporary survey with a Parisian perspective.
To find out more, visit LesBains-Paris.com
Photos by Stephane Bisseuil and Jerome Coton
Jef Aerosol
Zeer
Sambre
Mosko et associes
Clone
Baudelocque
Space Invader
L'Atlas
Signmaker and street artist Jay Shells' new project Rap Quotes annotates NYC locations with homemade traffic signs bearing site specific lyrics from rap tracks. Shells has the installation down to a science: he pops out of his car with a sign, a footstool, and his cell phone, and has each quote hung and tweeted in just a few moments. The tweets aren't just for vanity purposes, he guesses each sign probably won't last longer than a week before another fan steals it, so the quick photos are likely his only record. When asked about the theft, Shells doesn't seem to mind. "It's my gift to you," he says. [via Animal]
During a busy trip to Boston from their native São Paulo, Brazil, brothers Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, who are better known as Os Gêmeos, held their first "solo" exhibition in the United States and painted a mural as a gift to the city of Boston. MOCAtv was on hand for the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, as well as the painting of the mural, the first of this scale in Boston.