Thursday, February 1, 2007

Art sale alert: Aesthetic Appartus cleans house


Call it low-brow art. Call it kitsch. Call it "hart" (hipster art). Whatever new label it's acquired these days, poster art has been a part of the art world since long before Getrude Stein took her first sip of Bordeaux as a real expat. Artful posters promoting, say, a cabaret in Montmarte were as much a part of the Parisian landscape as the Seine and cigarettes and, er, berets and baguettes.

Minneapolis might not be Montmarte (and it might be, like, a whole other century...dude!), but it is home to well-known and respected rock poster artists Michael Byzewski and Dan Ibarra, a.k.a Aesthetic Apparatus. And on Saturday night from 7:00 p.m. til 11:00 p.m., the guys will be selling everything an early spring-cleaning bug caused them to obsessively gather up from their downtown space: Test prints, misprints, scratched prints, shirts, toys, and buttons will all be sold at low low prices in the City Club Room at Grumpy’s Bar downtown.

The duo have created and hand-printed one-of-a-kind posters for Liz Phair, Robert Pollard, the Strokes, Steve Earle, Ray Davies, and tons of other messiahs of their genres. They've also done their brand of highly stylized post-pop-art posters for local artists like STNNG, Belles of Skin City, and Mark Mallman, as well as those bar-rock and Springsteen fans we still claim are local, the Hold Steady.

We love the nightmarish, old-school coloring-book-art of the Lonesome Organist poster and the body-less, floating head of the Shins poster (or could it be that we really like pink and cream?), but, sadly, those neapolitan works of art have all been gobbled up. Still, that doesn't mean we won't be at the sale scrounging for a dinged-up Lewis Black zippo or a slightly off-center test print. Because there's something about those gentle screw-ups that has love—and art—written all over them.

Aesthetic Apparatus, http://www.aestheticapparatus.com/
Grumpy's downtown, http://www.grumpysbar.com/, 1111 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis, 612.340.9738

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