Andrea Michaelsson aka BTOY is a Spanish artist born in 1977. For several years she has been stencilling on her favorite media: “founded walls” with irregular surfaces, on which traces of pollution and fragments of advertising posters accumulate.
The damaged, worn-out walls, the doors and windows of barricaded abandoned buildings become the natural framework of his artistic work.
BTOY paints frozen characters whose eyes and expressions challenge us and give us pause to reflect on the passing of time. Images of a bygone era, her protraits inspired by ancient black and white photographs are characterized by a bright color palette and an energetic brushstroke.
Her portraits of women’s personalities give us pause to reflect on the image of women, and thus question how the imga of femininity was constructed in time. Her imagination is turned to Hollywood and the first half of the twentieth century, from the silent movies of the 1920s to 1950s musicals, from Louise Brooks to Judith Garland.
Recently, she began to focus on social conflict in the history and place of men and women in this context. It evolves towards pictorial compositions more and more textured by splashes and drips of colors like reinterpretations of Pixaçao. Practicing the stencil since 2001, Andrea Michaelsson has asserted her place on the international scene.
She was invited by Bansky to the Cans Festival in 2008, alongside fifty of the best stencil artists in the world. We also discovered her work in France, especially during the ephemeral exhibition of the Tour Paris 13. Also working on intertextuality, the artist presents in her works the precepts of post modernism.
