Chico (Egyptian artist)

Chico (born 1985/1986)[1] is the pseudonym of an anonymous Egyptian street artist and graffiti artist whose work has gained popularity and notoriety in Egypt following the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

Chico
Born1985/1986
NationalityEgyptian
Known forPublic art, stenciling, street art, graffiti

Career and artwork

Chico claims not to have studied art formally, although he now teaches it. He has said that he has always been "interested in graffiti and stencils in particular."[1] Chico has stated that he works with stencils because they are "fast and safe."[1] During the days of the revolution, he and fellow Egyptian graffiti artist El Teneen spray painted stencils on surfaces in public spaces, such as lampposts and walls, in downtown Cairo. However, these stencils were often quickly identified by security forces and removed, sometimes within minutes.[2]

Since the 2011 revolution, Chico's work has been noted for its political content and criticism of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, or SCAF, which as ruled the country since the February, 2011 resignation of former president Housni Mubarak. He said during the February revolution that contemporary political events had led to the politicization of his artwork, stating that "[m]y work has not always addressed the political situation. I have expressed a variety of issues, including social grievances, on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. But the Egyptian government does not want to differentiate between political and non-political messages. They are not welcomed by the government, regardless of the topic."[1]

gollark: I hope you were not malloced using my implementation.
gollark: ++delete all operating system development
gollark: > strings prefixed by the length are bad because you cant take a subset of the string by just adding an offset to the pointer and have it be a valid stringWait, you can't really do that anyway with null-terminated ones if you want a subset of fixed length.
gollark: You shouldn't do that. That would possibly cause so many memory issues.
gollark: I mean, to be honest I somewhat agree, it introduces so many convoluted problems and if it wasn't for the fact that many people need Unicode to meaningfully type and such on computers I would probably not want it.

See also

References
  1. Ati Metwaly (February 12, 2011). "Has the Egyptian revolution given birth to new Banksys?". Al Ahram English. Retrieved May 13, 2012.
  2. Sara Elkamel (February 27, 2012). "Egypt's golden era stars shine in pop-graffiti exhibition". Al Ahram English. Retrieved May 13, 2012.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.