British street artist Banksy has been getting all the press lately, but another street artist from across the Pond is turning heads in Sheepshead Bay.
Italian artist Zed1, renowned in Europe and England for his murals and public art, has an unusual mural adorning two walls flanking the entrance to an E. 27th Street parking lot, and while his work would probably seem commonplace in Williamsburg or Bushwick, it has taken Sheepshead Bay locals a little while to warm up to the piece.
But to be fair, that may be because it features a giant rat sliced in half.
“When everyone first looks at it, they think it’s disgusting and ugly,” said Joe Bouganim, co-owner of the Bottleneck Gallery, which helped make the E. 27th Street wall space available to the Italian artist. “But if they really think about, it tells a great story.”
In the painting, a man and woman are emerging from the two halves of the severed rat, each reaching out toward each other with the separate halves of an apple in hand, as though straining to make the fruit whole agin.
“It’s a story, which means beauty lies within,” explained Bouganim. “It’s a story in Italy, about finding the other half of your apple.”
The fruity fairy tale may be big in Italy, but it certainly isn’t well known to folks living around Jamaica Bay, who have struggled to find meaning and pleasure in the artist’s work.
“It’s not my cup of tea,” said local Joanne Honigman. “It’s well crafted, but I don’t quite get the statement. Do people come out of rats?”
Zed1 was in town with several other artists of European fame, who have made several walls in Bushwick and Williamsburg a little more interesting than they were before.
But Bouganim, a Sheepshead Bay native and art fan, had always wanted to bring his own neighborhood an taste of the work he’s so passionate about.
“I’ve lived in the area my whole life, and I wanted to see if I could get some wall space for these artists,” he said. “It’s something you don’t usually see around here.”
Getting the work into Sheepshead Bay was harder than anticipated for the native art lover, who had a hard time convincing the owners of blank wall space that there’s a difference between street art and graffiti.
“When they hear street art, they think graffiti,” said Bouganim. “I would go to a store and ask if they were interested, and most of them would turn me down right away.”
Eventually the gallery owner was able to secure two walls on E. 27th Street between Avenue U and Gravesend Neck Road, but even as the artist was at work, the criticism began to mount.
“The first day he started working on it, some guy came by and said, ‘This is disgusting, it’s ugly,’ and he’d only done part of the wall,” Bouganim said.
All in all, however, the locals and business owners on the block have come around to the novel work of art, and Marquis Rosado, the owner of Back Stage Hair Studio, whose shop is right across the street from the mural and who looks out at it everyday, says the view has been better since Zed1 come to town.
“I love it,” said Rosado. “It’s certainly different than what you usually see out here.”
