Here’s a new spin on street art that you can count on seeing more of in 2013 – the interactive variety, adding a narrative to an urban setting. The French artist OaKoAk uses crumbling city environments and breathes life into them with quirky humor. The Berlin-based art collective Mentalgassi created the two pieces in Spain shown at the bottom. Mentalgassi may have had a bigger budget than OaKoAk and a bigger scale to work on, but they share the same approach. Adding humor to the mundane is something that everyone can appreciate – we often do it ourselves in our own day-to-day lives. Do you classify works like these as “Art”? 
We took a break from street art for a while ’cause it was getting pretty intensive on here. But you can thank Ernest Zacharevic, aka Zachas, for pulling us back in. The Lithuanian artist puts a spin on outdoor murals that’s so intuitive you’ll wonder why you haven’t seen something like this before. Well, maybe you have, but certainly not quite this good. Zachas’s painting is striking in itself – more technically adept than what one typically sees in street art. But the juxtaposition of the images with real world objects and clever positioning makes that much more of an impact. These can be found on the streets of Penang, Malaysia.
Zacharevic was one of six artists featured in the site-specific RESCUBE exhibition, part of the George Town Festival 2012 in Penang. In another part of the festival, Zacharevic organized “Mirrors George Town,” consisting of 6 to 12 large-scale murals throughout core neighborhoods celebrating the town’s multiculturalism.
