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London

Illusionistic Paintings Intervene on London Phone Booths

Brooklyn native Dan Witz transforms English phone booths into topical portraits.

L: Boy monk. R: Headscarf woman. Images courtesy the artist

London's red telephone booths, an iconically impotent symbol of the country’s capital, have been often used as a platform for activist street artist. See Banksy’s London Phone Booth or Andrea Tyrimios' Living Box for examples. Brooklyn native Dan Witz, the classically-trained artist known for his highly academic paintings of mosh pits and raves, just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his new installation of interventionist paintings that would transform London’s telephone booths into a series of politically conscious portraits.

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In Breathing Room, an explicitly diverse group of characters will occupy a random selection of phone booths around London. Some of the subjects include a woman with a headscarf, a young monk, a yogi, and a girl in exercise clothing. Witz describes them on his Kickstarter page as, “all very still, all in the midst of a spiritual practice, and all projecting a quiet sense of peace and equanimity.”

Mock up of a Breathing Room installation on London Streets

Witz will affix each painting onto the fronts of telephone booths using an easily removable clear silicone. The artist says he plans to install these pieces in public areas around the city with hopes that they, “will be totally integrated into the public commons and the majority of passersby (and authorities) won’t notice them. At first.”

This style of “guerrilla street art” appears to be a common approach to activism in Witz’s work. He did a similar project called Wailing Walls in Frankfurt with Amnesty International, where he installed similarly illusionistic paintings of men, women, and children behind the bars of a jail cell. Both Breathing Room and Wailing Walls are an attempt to draw attention to the issue of unjust incarceration in Europe of citizens based on political association, or as Witz puts it, “further broadcast the plight of tortured and wrongly detained political prisoners across the world.”

The artist cites the recent terror attacks in Europe as having a profound effect on him and his approach to artmaking. Breathing Room is a departure from “the dark and didactic subject matter that characterized my past installations.”

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Head over to the Breathing Room’s Kickstarter to learn more about the project. For more from Dan Witz, visit the artist's website here.

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