Crocheted Olek Street artist

Today I was googling how to create hand drawn typefaces and I found a great video about Typography by Off Book PBS arts. I really thought that this was a great video and I tried to find more videos by Off Book PBS arts. And I found one about . In this documentary two female artists are portrayed, one of them fascinated me because she makes painfully large crocheted patterns.

Agata Olek says about herself that she loves to crochet, because it allows her to watch films while doing her artworks.

She is not a yarn-bomber but an artist. She says “I wish I could crochet even faster… I wish my hands would not hurt… I wish my back would be stronger…”

Here is a film about an artwork done in late December 2010. It covered an artwork by Arturo Di Modica, who installed his sculpture “Charging Bull” in Wall Street in 1989 without permission to do so. The crocheted cover was removed and torn by a park caretaker two hours after being installed.

Agata Olek is a street artist. Born 1978 in Poland she moved to New York City in 2000. Very little is known about her personally. She says about her balloon installations that balloons represent “the happy moments in life – which are often just as impermanent”. She also says the balloons remind her of the times when she worked as a travelling clown for Health Plus and would visit poor New York neighbourhoods.

Olek has an exhibition in the Jonathan LeVine Gallery in NYC until today (March 23rd 2013). This show is about a court case she has been involved in (and was condemned for) after having had a physical dispute with an aggressive male patron in a bar. Since then she has been collaborating with women artists all around the globe and engaging in a frenzy of artistic works like crocheted boxing gloves, decorative doily skulls, butterflies, and half-naked mer-people dining lavishly on and around a knitted table where a crocheted skeleton is seated. Words in her works include “Happiness is an Inside Job,” “Karma Has No Deadline,” and “Being Beautiful on the Inside is What’s Important HAHA Not Really.” A feeling of having survived underwater in a sunken ship is conveyed in this installation in reference to her violent experiences.

Video Credits: “The End is Far”, solo exhibition, Feb 23rd – March 23rd, 2013 Jonathan LeVine Gallery, a SURREEL film by Garrett Kafchinski, Adam Girgenti, Lauren Barber, produced by Rocky Ziegler and David Hausen
Image Credits: http://www.oleknyc.com
Watch some of her other videos .

This post is also available in: German