Discover street art for sale online today. Our curated online gallery means you don’t have to go the streets to see street art. We work with some of the most exciting and unique street artists of the moment and carefully select each and every piece for sale on our site. Whether you’re interested in purchasing a fantastical painting for your home, or looking for a contemporary urban piece, our vast collection offers an array of high-quality and limited edition pieces for you to choose from today.
We celebrate how street art has liberated artists to develop extraordinary styles and powerful messages that challenge traditional conventions in the art world and society.
If you’re looking for a piece that breaks down the boundaries of high and low culture, we recommend the prints of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Takashii’s ‘Superflat’ style and his colourful and glossy motifs of flowers and faces is heavily influenced by Japanese low culture of manga, kawaii and anime. Murakami’s ability to elevate characteristics of low culture to the walls of art galleries, demonstrates how artists can deconstruct the barriers of what art is categorised into public low culture and exclusive high art.
For a piece that’s closer to home, we love British artist Rebecca Mason who has taken inspiration from Barbara Kruger’s artworks presenting powerful messages and observations on the darker side of society’s expectations of the individual. In the digital print of Everyone’s Got Their S*** Together Apart From Me (2018) Mason presents the viewer with the words ‘Our Lives’ in blue neon light in front of text in a handwritten font. The first-person message reveals the vulnerability that comes with social comparison in modern society, and makes the viewer reflect and contemplate how social pressures affect their own mental wellbeing.
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What is Street Art?
Street art is commonly defined as art created in public spaces using the methods of tagging, fly posting, stencilling, stickers, freehand drawing and projecting videos. Graffiti art comes under the term of street art and commonly refers to images or texts which are sprayed onto public property. Although the movement originated in New York, in recent decades it has expanded across the world in cities such as London, Berlin, Lisbon, Seoul and San Paulo. Whether its traditional text-based tagging of one’s name on a public street or on a project video within a contemporary art gallery, street art cannot be confined into any genre or technique. This freedom has enabled the movement to create a richly diverse range of artwork which centres around the creative and expressive freedom of the artist.
History and evolution of street art
Street art originated in New York during the 1920s and 30s when teenagers used markers to write names in public spaces. These acts were seen as a marker of identity in the local area usually carried out by youths in poor communities. It was during the 1970s and 1980s that the style was used in subcultures associated with independent artists, political movements and ethnic minorities. These groups used the act of creating artwork in public spaces as a reaction to the social-political climate of the times. Materials such as the spray can were invented which enabled artists to write and draw on a large scale using a variety of mark lengths and colours. Artists began to develop and experiment with resources such as fly posting (pasting paper onto walls), large painted stencil, freehand drawing, and stickers to create different street art styles.
Artists such as Keith Haring used unoccupied advertisement space to experiment and develop their distinct style of using repetitive motifs to critique contemporary social-political issues. Keith Haring began drawing simple motifs of barking dogs using white chalk. The playful symbols gathered critical and commercial attention, however Haring developed these repetitive motifs with the intent to carry subversive and dark undertones. Haring’s most infamous piece Crack is Whack (1986) was a large mural in Lower Manhattan with the painted slogan ‘Crack is Whack’ surrounded by skulls, money, crosses and people. The artwork’s message was about the fatal drug epidemic of crack cocaine used in American cities. By using public space Haring was able to explore the artist’s role as a messenger and critic of society.
Whilst the art world elevated street artists into household names, many local authorities in the cities saw street art, graffiti in particular, as evidence of a degenerating community, and imposed legislation criminalising the act of marking buildings without permission. Artists had to make the decision whether to continue illegally or work with communities and authorities or bring their methods indoors. Feminist conceptual artist Barbara Kruger worked with art institutions to create ‘paste up’ prints in public and private space that challenged society’s ideas of gender, identity, race and power represented in mass culture and media. Her style originated with paste printing declarative statements in the style of negative/positive reproductions of photographs seen in mass culture, to create a juxtaposition of subversive text against conventional images. For the 1989 Women’s March on Washington DC in support for legal abortions laws, Kruger produced a print with the text ‘your body is a battleground’ on a women’s face with information about the march beneath. The pronouns in the text against the photograph of the model distorts the viewer’s expectations of viewing an image of mass culture with the politicalised slogan supporting women’s rights.
The British artist Banksy works under an anonymous pseudonym to protect his identity from criminal prosecution for creating illegal street artwork. Throughout the 1990s, Banksy gained recognition for his stencil work in the streets of Bristol and London. The stencil pieces conjured images and slogans with humour and political undertones of anti-war, anti-capitalism, anti-establishment messages. Throughout the 2000s, Banksy’s popularity gained momentum with his work being sold in high-profiled auctions, whilst local authorities continued to paint over work which was viewed as signs of social decay. Regardless of official actions, Banksy has remained one of the most influential street artists internationally. In 2018, Banksy played a prank on the artworld during a London auction house where his work Balloon Girl (2002) sold for £1.4 million. After the bidding ended an alarm triggered the artwork’s frame to act as a shredder and shred the artwork into pieces. This guerrilla style prank sparked global attention and reminded the art world that Banksy’s reputation and legacy as a street artist remains free from institutionalisation.
