Irvine Paints the Town: 'Street/Studio'

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THERE'S NO EASY way to categorize street art. Or exhibit it, for that matter. But despite the vagueness of the term, it can be defined in part by its intention: It allows artists to use the city and its streets as their canvas.

Washington is loaded with its own examples, such as the Shepard Fairey mural with his famed Obama image on 14th Street NW. Now, there's another street-art destination, located in an alley off P Street NW, behind Irvine Contemporary.

The outdoor installation is part of "Street/Studio," which includes street-art biggies such as Fairey, with his Soviet Socialist Realist-style graphics, and Swoon, with her lyrical, silhouetted portraits. But what sets this show apart is that it offers both sides of the street art practice.

"In this crossover generation, artists do work on the street, but they're also doing studio-based work," says gallery director Martin Irvine. "Most of these artists feel like they're always in a dialogue with the city, and they see their studio work as a continuum of what they do in public spaces."

Scale is one of the major differences between what's inside and what's outside. The artist Gaia, for instance, pastes a 30-foot image of a rabbit's profile in the alley, while in the gallery he shows a tender, three-foot painting of his mother on a rough collage of Chinese newspaper, referencing her home in New York's Chinatown.

The interior pieces also allow for more detail, as in the work of the artist called Evol, which begins outside with a spray-painted image of apartments in a forbidding, communist-era housing structure, some of which lift off into space.

Inside, the Berlin-based artist's stenciled paintings on cardboard reveal more of the city, turning a simple scene of a building wrapped in scaffolding into a mesmerizing portrait of the street itself.

» Irvine Contemporary, 1412 14th St. NW; through Aug. 1; 202-332-8767. (Dupont Circle)

Written by Express contributor Danielle O'Steen
Photo courtesy Irvine Contemporary