From the streets to your space…
signed limited edition prints.


Merny Wernz – Smooth Things Over

A painterly nod to the ushering in of Modernism? Would it be too much to suggest the particular shades of green deployed in our latest flyingleaps street poster recall the background foliage in Édouard Manet’s famed 1863 work Déjeuner sur l’herbe? Probably, yes.

Okay. Let’s try this… Do you have a green room at home or at work? Does it have a secondary colour thematic, say black? And maybe an accent or ‘pop’ of blood red? Do you like artworks whose subject is meticulously annotated? Does it matter to you whether that annotation affords fuck all help as to what the picture is about? If the answer to the above is, “What?!” then flyingleaps latest collaboration with Merny may just be the answer to all your 2024 interior decor needs.

Merny is a Bristol based artist, illustrator and muralist who is not averse to making work calling out criminals. Our latest street poster titled Smooth Things Over (2024) arguably tackles what is at first sight a less pressing problem: what to do when things are uneven? It’s an issue that presents itself in all shapes and sizes. There’s times when we accidentally rip off a fingernail and here the wise advice is to clip above the cuticle line and file very gently.

Occasionally though a rough patch arises that requires more than a manicure tool. There’s the bumpy jagged grief born of dented mental health, or not having a pot to piss in. Patience, tact, understanding (and cash) can all help, a diplomatic smoothing, a metaphoric abrasion if you will, a rubbing down of problems until they feel not quite as rough as we first thought.

Then there’s the heavier duty work of giving a ‘good scuffing’ to, say, the smirk on Piers Morgan’s face (for which you may need the tool specifically featured in Wernz’s new work). And taking us up a further notch regarding problems, there’s bombing a people and their land, razing whole cities and communities to the ground, where the so-called flattening or ‘dismantling’ should more properly be called out as war crimes and genocide.

Because of their contribution to the Nazi war machine Bosch had fifty percent of its works and offices flattened during WWII. After the war Bosch got going again amid the factory ruins by manufacturing cooking pots out of steel helmets. Employees could use these items themselves or trade them for other essentials. And post-war Bosch started making spark plugs for the Allies’ military vehicles, so all was soon forgiven. Well, that is until the company was implicated in using Uyghur Muslim slave labour in their manufacturing chain. The Chinese State, of course, has its own strategy of steamrollering Uyghur resistance in their so called ‘re-education camps’, designed to strip people of their personal, ethnic and religious ‘rough edges’.

So, as his vivid and multi-media website amply attests, there’s a lot more to Merny’s work than colourful wit and mordant irony. He’s clearly keen to tell truths but ‘at a slant.’ Other artworks annotate using letters on his signature black pin sticks pointing to various pictorial elements but with Smooth Things Over we have numbers. In general, annotation is an important component of careful ‘reading’, it improves comprehension, it interprets and comments, annotations reflect engagement. But what if – as is the case with Merny’s annotated artworks – there’s no legend so we’re unable to decode the information?

Perhaps what’s happening is we’re being invited to make up our own minds about the subject at hand, to look and think a bit harder? If that’s the case, you can’t help but notice Merny has omitted the number six? A number that connotes perfection (see Pythagoras and Saint Augustine); it’s a sign of good fortune (being the highest pip on a six-sided die); six is also the symbol of Venus, goddess of love… So, in Merny’s poster proposal to solve all our problems – personal, local, or global – blithely smoothing them over minus ideals of ‘good fortune, perfection, love’ could have us barrelling towards disaster. Maybe he’s onto something.

Smooth Things Over on the Street…

MAGDA ARCHER, Don’t Ask (2023)

Who wouldn’t welcome a brace of Magda Archer posters bringing this year to a close? Critical, mischievous, wit tinged with a world-weary despair. And if Archer’s cast of winsome creatures are world-weary, what hope the rest of us? Her ‘Don’t Ask’ (2023) features a couple of cute critters scampering past blue, wonky features of a city skyline, “How Bad Does It Get?” one asks. Hmmm.

Considering the state this country is in – NHS ‘death by a thousand cuts’; the cost-of-living rip-off; dire housing need; shilly-shally Tory eco policies and their ‘blame the stranger’ stance on immigration; the care system; scant mental health support… The list is daunting. Add to these domestic woes so many other tragic events, the utter abominations it seems humans persist in visiting on one another around the world, and you’d be forgiven for wanting to go full-on ostrich.

Archer’s images help us to peek between our fingers at the rottenness, while delivering stinging memos as to social injustice, personal foibles, systemic failure, etc., she also deploys pointed absurdity and singing colours and pithy language to make work that helps lighten the load of modern life.

BUY POSTER

MAGDA ARCHER, Otherwise (2023)

PLUS, we’re very pleased to announce flyingleaps has teamed up with UNCLE, the international paste-up crew, to super boost the street display of Archer’s second poster. ‘Otherwise’ (2023) doesn’t mince its message, a sweet Jack Russell Terrier sits with the CND logo – symbol of peace and dissent – in their mouth while the wraparound text reads, ‘WORLD PEACE IS COMING (otherwise we’re screwed).

Oppression and conflict stalk the face of the earth, born of religion, race, ethnicity, governance, ideology, politics, greed… All bitter antagonisms that have one thing in common, a mindset that perpetuates, creates, a bleak and binary cast of otherness. And with it a sense that those ‘others’ don’t need to be treated as fellow humans.

We all know a picture of an adorable pup with a symbolic doggie chew won’t save the world. The poster simply points out what’s blindingly obvious. There are already enough planet shattering problems that can, will only ever be solved via international cooperation.

BUY POSTER

The CND logo was created in 1958 by Gerald Holtom, a conscientious objector during WWII who explained it’s a design born of deep despair, “I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad.”

 

Humankind is facing a firing squad of its own making. And on so many fronts. The point of Archer’s ‘Otherwise’ poster? It’s about time we learnt to unknot grudges, to right the suffering and disadvantages stemming from present and historical wrongs, to work to appreciate alterity as opposed to using our differences as a pretext for hate. Otherwise, we really are screwed.

Head over to the features section of the MANFROMUNCLE website to read an interview with Magda Archer. Signed artists’ posters are available from www.flyingleaps.co.uk. And if you’re after a last minute festive gift check out Noni Stacey’s book LEAVE TO REMAIN, it’s a riveting collage of analysis and numerous works of art arising from the 2016 Brexit vote.



Anthony Burrill & Dr.D

ANTHONY BURHILL, You & Me & Us & We (2023)

A fresh rendition of Burrill’s ‘You & Me & Us & We’ (2023) artwork is a clarion call for more inclusive, community spirited social relations. As a street poster the work affords both consolation and inspiration. Whichever way passers-by cast their eyes across Burrill’s assemblage of bold pronouns and ampersands, the effect is a refreshing break from being cynically, garishly ‘implored’ or ‘shouted at’ by commercial adverts. In the face of personal and societal, local and worldly pressures, we all have moments when we say, ‘What is it I do? Is it worthwhile?’ Burrill’s answer, “I think you’ve just got to be brave and put work out there that you believe in. […] We’re all a work in progress, get conversations going, talk to as many people as possible, build relationships, bring people along with you.”
BUY POSTER

Dr.D, State (2023)

Dr.D has produced a typically adroit if harrowing new poster version of ‘State’ (2023). It points to the absurd, scandalous lack of affordable housing in this country. It’s a conviction he expressed earlier this year with a brilliant installation at Glastonbury but bears endless repetition. An ONS survey suggests that since records began the cost of private renting has seen the largest hike ever in the 12 months leading up to June 2023. It is predicted to rise even further in the near term. Social housing isn’t fairing much better with the main housing associations across the UK increasing rents by the maximum amounts allowed. And service charges aren’t covered by the same suggested 7% limit. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say housing policy in the UK is one big catastrophic, arguably criminal, fail.

BUY POSTER



VIEW THE ROYAL CORONATION COLLECTION HERE
ALL CORONATION POSTERS AVAILABLE IN THE SHOP

All posters are 30×20 inches.

All posters printed since 2021 are limited editions of 100 – prior to that they are editions of 300. All are 30×20 inch.

(apart from More That Unites Us (2017) and Agitate In Memoriam (2018) which were limited to a run of 100)

Dr.D aka Subvertiser

While the debate goes on as to whether flyposted and other oppositional art or visual activism has any direct effect in bringing about sociopolitical change, what it can do at its best is feed into the publics’ disposition.

Through strong imagery, cogent or quizzical text, humour, relatively speedy production and distribution, via its capacity to occupy anomalous spaces in the urban environment and through an imaginative, enacted engagement with matters of concern it can generate social media interest and help inform, even propel, opinion.

Dr. D’s targets include surveillance culture; the social effects of neoliberalism; commodification; mealy-mouthed and uncaring politicians;  abuses of power in the media… Much more than bald sloganeering Dr. D’s imagery and text pieces often emerge, on reflection, as enigmatic meditations on twenty-first century existential angst.

Transgressing boundaries can reveal hidden rules. One could cite the precedents of the carnivalesque ‘telling truth to power’, vaudevillian comedy, Dada gestures in art but all of these, in a – it’s only a bunch of pucks/entertainers/artists – sense, operated in ‘sanctioned’ arenas. Dr. D’s contributions to the urban environment are rarely sanctioned and it’s this that contributes significantly to their traction and incisiveness.

The urban spectacle would have us believe that its over-riding character is, yes aspirational, but emphatically neutral and apolitical: that generally we’re going to be just fine if we carry on pretty much as we are. Dr. D’s pithy interventions, highlighting so many germane issues and employing such a variety of modes of address, repeatedly suggest otherwise.

Curfew, Dr D, in Oslo
I Remember the Future in Oslo