Nevercrew continues to explore their unique style’s potential with their latest mural. The Swiss street art duo recently completed “Offset” in Madrid, Spain for Urvanity Art Fair while exhibiting with Artrust gallery, according to a press release from the artists.
With “Offset,” Nevercrew sharpens the sensibilities they’ve been practicing with their most recent body of work, which dutifully conducts “the search for artworks that could react directly to reality, to human action and to human influence, with a direct focus on environmental changes,” as explained in another June 2019 press release.
The mural’s composition and color scheme harken back to Nevercrew’s recent murals from the past two years. However, “Offset” is a relative rarity within this body of work for the animals it depicts. Whereas Nevercrew typically spreads their themes by depicting whales, they occasionally dabble with bears as well, as they have with their work in Madrid.
In an effort to highlight just how entangled the forces at play within the natural world have become, they stack their animals atop each other in an only slightly haphazard fashion; the work contrasts the innate organization of ascending order with the alternating directions and various positions that the bears take. Nevercrew also painted the gigantic “Offset” in their traditional palette of primary colors red and blue, juxtaposed against the black and white that the bears themselves are rendered in.
Their press release explains,“This work focuses on disproportion, on a delicate balance as a result of the reducing of natural space and resources in favor and because of human progress and attitudes. The human gaze on nature seems to be limited to the perception it has of it, as if it’s subordinate to its existence, and this maintains a detachment and a lack of awareness about the local and global situation, about reality, where there’s no understanding of the human position in the overall natural exchange.There’s an environment that lost its balance, resources that are no more available, something that’s going to miss also for the same humans that need to benefit of it, but that nevertheless keep moving in the same direction.”
The lack of humans throughout this series of work speaks to the imbalance that Nevercrew points out their statement. Although animals and humans inhabit the same world, their domains are considered separate to a degree. “Offset” includes but one minute hint of the human world, a tiny discarded camera at the painting’s base. Without any kind of peace or understanding, the bears are left to decide for themselves. Their relationship to the issue proves difficult to discern. In “Offset,” the bears’ facial expressions vary from bewildered, exasperated, apathetic, and the rare glimmer of joy that culminates with the youngest bear at the top. This final symbol perhaps denotes a hope for the future.
Urvanity Art Fair, the event that commissioned this gorgeous new mural, seeks to invigorate a hope of their own. The fair’s manifesto asserts its status as “a platform for a New Contemporary Art.” They hold a great deal of hope for the future the creative world. In order to “build a dialogue with modernity” the event works to “support a production and dissemination of ideas, as well as to facilitate the access of a wide audience to those contemporary creation practices that outline a vast cultural and urban landscape.”
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