This week’s graffiti post is less about illegal art and more about some epic commissioned street art on an awesome scale. Miami duo Friends With You who made their name with a charmingly minimalistic, brightly colored pop art style, have worked with the Fubon Art Foundation to install a massive art piece on the exterior of the Fubon Financial building in Taipei, Taiwan.

In keeping with the “looking up” theme of the Very Fun Park festival, the installation has become a massive focal point with its brightly colored flowers and wide eyed critter drawing people’s gaze skyward. It’s a beautiful work, the type of public art I wish American cities would get do more of. I’m still happy to see FWY doing more of their large scale installation work, akin to some of their earlier ones:

Cloud City at the MOCA North Miami, 2005.

Rainbow Valley at the Aventura Mall in Miami, Fl, 2006.

Dream Maker at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2008.

Beyond installing rainbows in unexpected places, Friends With You have accumulated a great selection of prints and clothing over the years.

left – Malfi Club Men – a limited edition shirt produced for the opening of their flagship boutique, 2009
right – Friends With You x Beautiful Decay – a collaboration between FWY and the design magazine Beautiful Decay, 2006

Beautiful Decay is having a pretty massive sale on their website. The Friends With You shirt is only $6 and every other one in the shop is discounted. Check out their online store.

If you’re into spending a little more money, Friends With You sell a variety of limited edition prints in their online shop. You’ll cough up more than $6 though, as their art goes for between $35 and $200.

Clicking on each image will take you to FWY’s shop.

Well, this concludes the second week of Graffiti Thursdays. While I hate that name, that’s just the day these posts fell on…and yes, this doesn’t really fully qualify as graffiti, but it’s what I like. I do enjoy keeping with the multi-national theme of the art posts, so we’ll see what next week brings. Hopefully pictures of Bengalise graffiti portraits of 1930′s American political figures.

Via the great chiptune/videogame blog Albotas, I discovered the work of Beau Barker. He puts up some awesome pixel pasteups down in Austraila. There’s a bunch of wonderful Kirby images, as well some loving portraits of retro consoles.

Click for the high rez on each:

Check out his his flickr stream for more.

And, finally what best compliments the marriage of Kirby and street art? This wonky, wonderful mashup:

Never has Kirby seemed so hard.

Beyond music, one of my favorite things is graffiti and street art. Living in Los Angeles, I do appreciate the amount of great graffiti going on out here. For Taking Tiger Mountain, I’m starting a new bit to focus on good graffiti around the net (as well stuff I see day to day, once I get a new camera).

For the first one, I’d like to throw some light on the Icelandic graffiti scene. I’m a fan of most all everything Icelandic (except maybe Hákarl) and thanks to the magic of the internet I found a fantastic Flickr stream of graffiti pics from around Reykjavik. Flickr user Orgelpianoman brings us a ton of great shots of the Reykjavik scene. I saw a bit of what the city had to offer when I was there in ’06 (the pic at the top of the post is one of mine), but as a local he gets into the hidden away spots to the good stuff a tourist wouldn’t feel comfortable sniffing out.

Click for the high rez on each:

Check out the full Flickr stream for more.