Mentalgassi is a street art collective from Berlin, Germany. Back in 2007, their first work together took form when they glued large black and white portraits onto recycle bins and turned them into "metal heads". Since then, many different street art installations have followed:
In 2007 the friends created their first three-dimensional work. With a digital camera, Photoshop software and a large commercial printer, Mentalgassi produced vast black-and-white portraits (usually of family or friends) which they then glued with wallpaper paste onto some of Berlin’s recycling bins.
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‘Metalheads’ - which were part-street-art-part-sculpture-part-photograph - was followed by hilarious face stickers attached to U-Bahn ticket validation machines and then by ‘Public Intimacy’, a series of six fleeting Berlin installations: an early morning U-Bahn carriage quickly transformed into a twee and cosy living room, a photo booth converted into a lavatory, an U-Bahn driver’s platform mirror redressed as a domestic bathroom mirror with shelf, toothbrushes and deodorant. Many of the ‘Public Intimacy’ installations lasted for less than five minutes, until removed by authorities. ‘Or nicked by the public,’ recalled one of the Mentalgassi. ‘Within five minutes someone stole the deodorant stick.’
Metal heads in Berlin. Image via ekosystem.org:
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With their growing success, the three friends began to export their work along with the anarchic, humorous spirit of Berlin. At Getxo Photo near Bilbao, in response to the festival’s ‘In Praise of the Elderly’ theme, Mentalgassi attached faces to two-metre-diameter balloons and set them adrift in the harbour. In Serbia at the Novi Sad EXIT music festival they launched smiling, illuminated helium balloons over the heads of the crowd. In Poland they transformed a Katowice city bus into a mobile ghetto blaster. They have worked with Amnesty International, Converse sports shoes and in Finland created vast ‘fence pictures’ as part of the Pori Art Museum ‘Street Art: the New Generation’ show.
Featured image: Mentalgassi in collaboration with Mundano on Pimp My Carroça in São Paulo.
