The Spanish Street Artist Painting Old Masterpieces And Selling Them On Instagram

On a sunny day out of doors the beachside town of Málaga, Spain, it’s common to discover a portray hanging on a deserted wall amidst the extra expected varieties of graffiti. Getting towards the paintings, it’s miles even extra surreal to recognize the portray is a Monet or a Vermeer or a Rembrandt – nicely, a reproduction of one – and that the frame it seems to be placed in is an illusion, part of the painting itself.

At this spot just off the motorway in Vélez-Málaga, there aren’t any traveler masses shuffling via a crowded museum and no stark white gallery walls, simply a pleasant viewing revel in with the sound of birds chirping and a warm breeze.

Spanish artist Julio Anaya Cabanding loves to paint in this environment. With his classical schooling, he has specialised in replicating old masterpieces (and their authentic frames) in deserted locations and on deserted cardboard.

“The creditors are loopy with the cardboard,” stated Cabanding, pointing to portions in his small Málaga studio in La Térmica cultural center.

Less than 12 months because are graduating from the school of Fine Arts at the University of Málaga, the 31-year-old Cabanding finds himself with a hectic schedule of artwork gala’s and indicates at global galleries as a waitlist of creditors who observed his paintings through Instagram.

Instagram As Art Marketplace

Lacking the art global cachet of different Spanish towns like Barcelona, Madrid, or Bilbao, the art scene in Málaga remains nascent. But with the Centre Pompidou Málaga and the Málaga Collection of the Russian Museum of St. Petersburg (Colección del Museo Ruso de San Petersburgo), both beginning in 2015, and a distinctly new great arts faculty at the University of Málaga, many young artists are attracted to this town on Spain’s southern coast.

However, there are not yet many nearby galleries or creditors to aid these new artists. This led Cabanding to promote his work on Instagram, and he is won an international following as a result.

“Instagram is a splendid device to reveal your work,” said Cabanding. He prefers to sell his paintings thru the platform, pronouncing that even as he collaborates with galleries on suggests, he does not need to be represented utilizing one because it might mean giving up a 50% reduction of his income.

As different artists have migrated to the extraordinarily visual platform in current years, he’s not by myself, and creditors (especially millennial art consumers) are following.

“I simply came across him on Instagram,” said Daniel Hays. As a London-primarily based collector of father, avenue, and urban art (consisting of works utilizing Banksy, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol), Hay has connected with curators, galleries, and dealers on Instagram earlier than, however, Cabanding turned into the first artist he contacted immediately to buy a chunk. “I think it appears to be increasingly common these days that human beings are going immediately to the source, so to speak. Which, in case you are building up dating with the artist, it’s actually an excellent manner of doing it.”

For other collectors, finding artists on Instagram has ended up the norm.

“ninety% of the work I come upon is thru Instagram,” stated Daniel El-Ismail, every other graffiti and road art collector in Berlin and a buyer of Cabanding’s work. El-Ismail prefers to purchase pieces immediately from artists, though he finds that they’re commonly discouraged from promoting their work privately.

The Place Of Galleries

Sasha Bogojev is a contributing editor for Juxtapoz Magazine and curator of Cabanding’s first solo show in Imola, Italy, and a show earlier this 12 months in which Cabanding participated. While he thinks Instagram is a useful tool to find and get in touch with new artists, he does not propose artists use it to sell their work at once.

“From my revel in, it is galleries which might be validating the paintings of an artist,” said Bogojev.

“When an artist is new and sparkling, and the work – people like it and people need it – it can cross like that for a while, and this period can last for, I do not know, months to years. But subsequently, sooner or later, you’ll supply enough creditors that similar to the paintings,” defined Bogojev. “Then there is the next institution of collectors who want to gather art it’s been exhibited; it truly is recognized in that feeling.”

Aside from adding to artists’ workloads, Bogojev says he’s witnessed artists having issue pricing their pieces – both overvaluing them due to a non-public attachment to the paintings or, more regularly, undervaluing their art.

Cabanding admits that along with his waitlist of consumers on Instagram developing, he desires to raise expenses for destiny portions from their contemporary range of €500-€1500 ($560-$1680).

“I understand that Julio, thanks to Instagram, has been capable of growing very quickly,” said Marco Chiarini, proprietor and dealing with director of the Tales of Art gallery in Imola, which is now hosting a solo display of Cabanding’s paintings in collaboration with Musei Civici di Imola (the Museum of the town). “If he became doing this five years in the past and simply posting on his internet site, perhaps it’d have taken him ten years.”

It’s All In How You Frame It

In addition to his contemporary solo display, Cabanding has exhibited in Chemnitz, Germany, and at Galerie C.O.A in Montréal as a part of the New Classics show, a group display with different contemporary artists reimagining conventional works of art.

“I invited him to color without delay at the gallery wall, and the reaction changed into super,” said Jean-Pascal Fournier, owner and curator of Galerie C.O.A in Montréal. “[He] turned into the primary artist to sell all his works from the show.”

For collectors who value Cabanding’s on-the-wall style but need to look at his work in a gallery, this style of portraying without delay within the area can provide a taste.

“It’s mighty while you see it in character as it’s nearly difficult to tell while you see it from a distance that it’s no longer a real painting hanging there,” stated Bogojev. “Once he paints them on antique cardboard, he shows those valuable masterpieces as something drawn on a literal piece of rubbish. So I suppose it is very an awful lot humanizing this distance that exists among the pleasant art world and commonplace human beings.”

“I paint those pictures because they may be an artwork that my mom and different folks who do not know so much approximately artwork can apprehend,” explained Cabanding.

Cabanding says that these trample foil frames are continually harder to recreate than the paintings themselves, taking him 5 to 8 hours, whereas the artwork’s handiest require two to a few.

El-Ismail, the collector from Berlin, explains that after he has asked Cabanding for a Van Gogh or a Vermeer earlier, Cabanding responds that he has to see the body first.

As for the difficulty of placing those frameless cardboard pieces?

“He doesn’t care about the cardboard. It seems like the dirtier it is, the more he likes it,” stated El-Ismail. “So, the putting is absolutely quite tough.”