The trio of Spanish artists we’ve selected to create original alternative poster designs for the Cirque de Soleil show Corteo is Miss Van, Nuria Mora and Ricardo Cavolo. Last week, we presented Madrid-based illustrator Ricardo Cavolo, whom poster went on sale last thursday. This week, we travel into Nuria’s universe.
It was the comedian Martin Mull — not avant-pop icon Laurie Anderson or weirdo rocker Frank Zappa, as many believe — who once made the now-famous remark, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” That may be true. The street art of Madrid’s Nuria Mora, who created a strikingly graphic design for the Madrid leg of Safewalls’ journey around the world, doesn’t dance about architecture. It dances with it.
Mora first dove into street art in the late ’90s, leaving aside the lettering and cartoon characters so common in graffiti in favour of an entirely abstract style devoted to colour, geometry and crisp, straight-edged forms. It’s a sensibility she shared with the artist Eltono. Not surprisingly, the pair came up together in Madrid, jamming on public walls and, in more recent years, sharing a wide variety of gallery shows throughout Spain and out to Berlin, London and L.A.
Even the political dimension of the bold, graphic designs the two execute — which as often as not show an affinity with the 8-bit art movement — are abstracted. Mora says her work is about questions rather than statements, something for the ordinary passerby to chew on. Certainly, what she and Eltono do isn’t so much commandeer a surface as work with it, departing from and commenting on the forms and angles already present.
Mora has flirted with the fashion industry — she started up a line of purses, Kiricol — but dictating style isn’t really her style. Besides, the administrative drudgery would keep her away from the walls she loves to liven up. Her funky, right-angled glyphs pop up all over, throughout southern Europe, in Egypt, in the favelas of Brazil and shantytowns of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Nuria Mora’s poster for SAFEWALLS will be unveiled and will go on sale on sale thursday April 14th.
Nuria Mora street art:
Nuria Mora drawings:
Learn more about Nuria Mora’s art on her official website.
