Guest Artist: Kool Koor

Going by a creative pseudonym of Kool Koor, Charles Hargrove is a New York-born Brussels-based artist who is considered by many to be one of the most influential and pivotal urban artists of the original NYC urban scene. Known for his space-age-inspired works, which range from surreal scenes to intricate works of abstraction, Kool Koor’s style is unique and instantly recognizable.
We enjoyed a very special four days with Kool Koor as he worked with Primary and Secondary Art students.  Sharing his process and how he uncovers inspiration, the students were given a rare opportunity to work alongside a genre-defining and defying artist.
Craftily balancing between somewhat surrealistic scenes and pieces that possess pure abstraction, Charles Hargrove developed a style that featured contrasting areas of extension and compression within the canvas. From the year of 1979, Kool Koor expanded his artistic range as he began to create paintings, drawings, site specific pieces and illustrations that were much more gallery-oriented than his previous pieces. He explains his work with the following statement: I see my twisting structures, with their never ending labyrinths and formations a direct result of perfect coexistence. Charles Hargrove’s artwork appears to be a complicated and extensively detailed system of hieroglyphs consisting of splines, circles, angles, lines, wheels, arches.  Biographical information available at www.widewalls.ch