Klone is one of Tel Aviv’s most prolific street artists whose recent work involving his iconic “predator” characters, painted and wheat pasted throughout Tel Aviv help under gird the city’s status as Israel’s capital of culture.
Klone was born in 1983 in the Ukraine, still under Soviet rule. His impressions of his Ukrainian childhood are of snow, adventure and endless queues in shops. At age 11 he moved to Israel, and at age 17 he stumbled across “graffiti”, but as the Israeli graffiti scene did not yet exist his education was credited to magazines, movies, and the internet. His first attempts on the street – his preferred surfaces being walls and metal – lead to a heavy interest and subsequent addiction!
At age 21 he was released from army service, that every citizen of Israel is obliged to do, and with the Israeli street art scene still in its “diapers”, he makes the move to more communicative art, switching to simple images applied using stickers, posters, installations and wall murals, and with the public reaction to something new and fresh, not before seen on the streets of Tel Aviv “the developing truth begins”.
Klone’s work surrounds the human tendency to act as a predator. He sees humans as often showing their teeth and biting their surroundings, believing, “the bigger and sharper your teeth are the higher your chance to survive among other predators around you”.
He prefers working on a large scale and in colour. He is entirely self taught and also works in metal, printing, sculpture, but foremost painting, and likes to spend as much time and effort as possible working on the streets.
Previously doing letter graffiti under the pseudonym MAKE, nowadays he chooses almost exclusively to concentrate on image work. In the last three years Klone has exhibited at numerous group shows in Israel, USA, UK and continental Europe, as well as two solo shows in Tel Aviv. He describes his characters as, “at first appearing unreal but by looking at them deeper you will always see something of yourself”.
By: Demian Smith
- To find out more about street art in Tel Aviv check out: http://www.telavivstreetart.blogspot.com