Kobra | Upfest

Kobra

Kobra was born in the neighborhood of Campo Limpo, in the outskirts of São Paulo, and the design has always been a constant in his life. At age 12, already involved with older boys and connected to Hip Hop culture and “pixação”, a form of graffiti native to the Southeastern metropolises of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, he used to tag clandestinely walls from downtown in late 1980s. The contact with graffiti came five years later. Restless, he sought to improve his illustrations and began to have contact with the art of walls through books, besides meeting artists such as Diego Rivera and Candido Portinari, two of his great inspirations.

Following the urban art developments in São Paulo in early 1990s, he created the Studio Kobra, converging to an original mural painting and taking advantage of his characteristics as an experimenter artist, and skilled realistic painter.

Thus, he develops the project “Walls of Memory” which seeks to transform the urban landscape through art and redeem the memory of the city. This project is the synthesis of his peculiar way of creating, through which he paints but also adheres interferes and supersedes scenes and characters from the first decades of the twentieth century. It is an amalgamation of nostalgia and modernity, urging through scenographic paintings, sometimes monumental, from which he creates portals to wistful moments of the city.

The largest of these murals, measuring 1000 m2 was carried out in 2009, at Avenida 23 de Maio in celebration of the anniversary of the city of São Paulo.

Parallel to his work with the Studio, Kobra develops his personal production, with exhibitions in and outside Brazil, besides that he is always researching with different materials and new techniques, such as 3D, or anamorphic, pavement painting. At the invitation of the municipality of São Paulo, he made the first 3D pavement painting in Brazil.

Kobra has also painted several murals in London, Athens, Lyon, Los Angeles and New York, where he painted his powerful reinterpretation of Alfred Einstein’s most famous picture.

In the beginning of 2013, Kobra painted a huge mural paying homage to the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, covering the full side of an 18 story skyscraper at Avenida Paulista, in São Paulo, which has attracted worldwide attention and reverberated through several media outlets and art specialized media in different places around the world.

The artist has traveled around the world spreading his style, and the list of cities with Kobra’s artworks has been increasing quickly, comprising cities as Moscow, Lexington, Los Angeles and also Miami, where he painted at the 2013 Miami Art Basel.

Recently, Kobra painted a mural on the facade of MAAM Museum “Museo dell’Altro e Dell’Altrove”, which faces the historical Via Prenestina in Rome. The wall is part of a project that includes his first solo exhibition in Italy, titled Peace (May 9th - June 25th), at the Dorothy Circus Gallery. For the exhibition Kobra painted 10 brand new kaleidoscopic portraits of the leading personalities who fought in the name of Peace.

On his latest trip, Kobra went to Sweden, where he painted the “Alfred Nobel” mural in the city of Boras. After finishing his work in Sweden, Kobra traveled to Poland at the invitation of Urban Forms Gallery, which has previously invited prominent artists like Inti, from Chile; Roa, from Belgium and the Brazilian brothers OsGemeos (The Twins). The “Rubinstein” painting is placed on a huge wall – 22 meters long by 22 meters tall. Right after that, Kobra went to France and the USA, where he painted his latest wall in New York.

Currently, Kobra keeps his Studio at Vila Madalena, São Paulo and his development as an artist, and the recognition of his name as one of thegreat contemporary street artists has been growing more and more. 

Restless and relentless in his creativepursuits, Kobra is now a phenomenon of Brazilian new-vanguard art that “no longer” allows to be ignored.

Art work by Kobra