The best of the 'new Banksies'

Whether they're dropping impromptu pieces among the bins or launching full-on digital art happenings, London's street artists are moving fast. Below are some of the new street artists to watch out for!!

D*face
D*face creates classic street art. Like Banksy, his imagery is wry, graphic and accessible. He started out producing Disney-influenced pop characters, which he printed on stickers and posters. Now he makes more complex, playfully anti-establishment graphic pieces fusing gothic skulls with icons from Che Guevara to the Queen.

www.dface.co.uk




Eine
Hoxton man of letters
Eine is in love with typography. Over a few years he has transformed Hoxton into a giant sentence, covering many of the area’s metal shutters with colourful capital letters in a circus-style font.

Over the past two years, Eine has painted more than 60 of his letters in London, Newcastle, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Paris. ‘Every time I visit a crime-ridden city I try to paint some shutters. You only find shop shutters in places where there is a fear, real or not, of crime,’ he observes.
www.einesigns.co.uk



The artist known as Caliper Boy
If Tim Burton made street art, it might look something like Caliper Boy. Images of this disturbing Victorian character pop up on fly-posted prints in strange nooks of London, emblazoned with the words ‘Dirty Little Secret’ or ‘I Feel Damp’. The artist prefers to lurk behind his creation: a disabled boy in a full body brace with one hand down his pants. Caliper Boy has a whole backstory, loosely set in the 1850s.





Adam Neate
Cardboard is his medium, the streets are his sketchbook. Unlike many street artists, Adam Neate couldn’t really be called a vandal; a litterbug, maybe. For the past decade he’s scattered his paintings around London, dropping his work everywhere from Shoreditch to the unsuspecting galleries of the Tate. Notoriously, he once left 100 pieces among east London refuse piles for the bin men to deal with. Neate views his freely distributed pieces as the foundation for ideas he then develops in gallery work, a kind of giant urban sketchbook on found cardboard. For Neate, this alternative to canvas has the added attraction of scratches, scuff marks, dents and holes. ‘If the surface already has some feeling to it, it will help with the feel of the painting,’ he maintains.