“Liquidation of the YES Symbols” at Art Miami

De Buck Gallery is pleased to announce Zevs’ upcoming performance during the VIP Preview for Art Miami in collaboration with the fair. The performance, during which Zevs will “liquidate” his YES image, composed of the powerful currency symbols of the Yen, Euro, and Dollar, will take place at 8 PM on Tuesday, December 4, 2012 in the Art Miami garden.

Zevs’ Liquidated YES which he has also treated in bronze, on canvas, and on paper, is one of the latest manifestations of his Liquidated series. Like many of his earlier works that deal with corporate logos, Liquidated YES remarks upon the role of omnipresent symbols – in this case, symbols that are inevitably part of the everyday lives of millions of individuals worldwide. During the Art Miami performance, Zevs will recreate this image on a 12 foot tall wall, using his trademark “liquidation” technique to transform the symbols into endless drips against a black void, perfectly embodying the instability of the outside world.

Liquidated YES is the perfect embodiment of today’s globalized economy. American, European and Japanese currencies exist side by side, occupying the same visual space, and yet are unable to maintain their solidity. The symbols melt away at a time when the world and the United States struggle with and endlessly hope to rebound from economic difficulties, and yet they still urge us on with that powerful word “YES” – continue to buy, sell, and in short, support the consumer culture that Zevs’ work in many ways rebels against. The image’s link to the economy is further strengthened by the artist’s own association of it with actual currency – the gold finish used in each medium is reminiscent of the metal used in coins.

Zevs’ Miami performance also represents the artist’s return to a street art mindset. The large-scale mural replicates the liquidations that Zevs created on buildings in his hometown of Paris and elsewhere early in his career. Thus, Liquidation of the YES Symbols represents a continuation both of the methods and iconography that have been representative of Zevs’ career both on the streets and on canvas.

Art Miami will run from December 4 – 9, 2012, and is located at 3101 NE 1st Avenue in Miami, FL. De Buck Gallery is proud to participate in the fair, and will be exhibiting at Booth C24.

Zevs was born in France in 1977, and first gained renown as a street artist in Paris during the 1990s. Since then, Zevs has risen to become one of the most prominent figures on the contemporary street art scene. He is best known today for his trademark “liquidation” technique, in which he transforms seemingly solid images into evocatively dripping ones that are perhaps more unstable than they seem. Zevs has experimented with a number of methods in his graffiti, canvases, and performances that help him to subvert the unmistakably ubiquitous commercial and Hollywood driven culture of the twenty-first century. In the past, this has included a high profile “kidnapping” of a figure from a billboard, an infamous arrest following his creation of a large-scale mural of a liquidated Chanel logo in Hong Kong, and his Visual Violations series, in which he blurs out the faces of figures like Jim Morrison and Marilyn Monroe. He has extensively participated in exhibitions and performances worldwide, including at the 2010 Moscow Biennial, Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek (Copenhagen), the historic Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich) and most recently at the Mechelen Cultural Center (Mechelen, Belgium). He currently lives and works in Paris and Berlin.

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