AWAKE recommends: 5 ECO artists
Ecological Art or “Eco Art” is a contemporary form of environmental art created by artists who are concerned about local and global environmental situations. Given the current situation of climate change and pollution, it is only natural that artists started to address this issue more and more, not only through the subjects they approach, but also by the materials they use.
Scroll through the galleries to see each artist's works.
Pedro Marzorati
The Argentinean artist based in France has been exploring the relation between art and climate change for quite some years with projects such as “Where the Tides Ebb and Flow,” “Noah Drowned” and “WIND Habitats stolen by the wind”
Art projects of Pedro Marzorati are based on the reinterpretation of nature, misappropriation of objects and codes that are known to us. These projects seek to change the perception that we have to “play” with them in an imaginary and poetic world.
Maria Balan
Born in an artistic family, Maria Balan is a multidisciplinary artist from Romania who activates in graphic design, street art and (our personal favorite) linocut printing. Not only is she an artist that works with sustainable materials and always looking to improve in this area, but she also focuses the subject of some of her projects on ecological themes.
Anomalica is her work for the One Night Gallery event in Bucharest, it is a book compilation of hybrid characters that represent social and ecological issues that have a negative effect on humanity. We will let you explore the 13 characters created, but would like to highlight one that is dear and near to our heart “The Mimetic Tree”, a tree that spends all his life trying to run and hide from humans who want to cut him like they did the rest of the forest, by mimicking a person.
Marius Ritiu
Marius Ritiu is an artist who grew up in Transylvania and is based in Antwerp and New York at the moment. Part of artist duo together with Cristian Bors, together they infiltrated the Antwerp art scene with a smart and interesting idea where they included their names on posters in the city featuring an exhibition. They never really intended to get inside the exhibition, their work was outside, behind a fence, two statues of themselves on bikes. The project called “Behind the Fence (Uninvited Artists)” worked and they continued to make art pieces that would mainly address contemporary socio-political issues.
Marius Ritiu as a solo artist is more special and universally inclusive, not only does he use mainly natural and recycled materials, but his art pieces transport you to more imaginative and complex states. Abstract, decomposed and deeply meaningful his works of art have been exhibited from Bucharest to New York, the most recent one being Rock’n Roll (Sisyphus – Part II), a towering oblong hammered-copper rock sitting in a Costco shopping cart that the artist imagines as a meteorite fallen from interstellar space that was displayed this year at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York.
Richard Shilling
Is a British artist and photographer who works only with natural materials. You could even say that his art is basically rearranging nature. With no artistic background, Richard Shilling started to copy the works of Andy Goldsworthy, the father of modern rock balancing.
After studying the work of Goldsworthy, Richard Shilling started developing his own style and spend ours and days outside constructing his pieces and waiting for the right weather conditions to take the best possible pictures of the work. His ephemeral sculptures are a result of ours of searching for the right materials (sometimes even the veins of a leaf are carefully studied), construction and placement in the right angle for the best picture.
Bordalo II
Artur Bordalo is a Lisbon based artist who grew up in the art studio of his grandfather, painter Real Bordalo, and doing illegal graffiti.
Wanting to continue the legacy of his grandfather, he took his name and started to develop his own original type of graffiti combined with 3d elements and making statement pieces regarding the greedy society we live in. His pieces have been commissioned all around the world, his main materials being pieces of “trash” (recycled materials) that are turned into colorful and alive animals or characters as his out personal manifesto to consumption.