Manyoly In London

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Grabbing our camera we headed out to pick some coffee and catch up with some of the street art that went up in the neighborhood over the week while we were away in Scotland.One new piece that grabbed our attention right away was a colourful hand-painted paste-up on Hanbury Street just off Brick Lane.We instantly recognized the portrait piece as that of French artist Manyoly. Based in Marseille it was only the other week that we were cycling around Ostend with Manyoly and fellow French artist ParseError who were both visiting the Belgian coastal city for the Crystal Ship festival The London paste-up by Manyoly looked fresh and suggested she had just arrived in London. We took a few pictures of the work and started to write a message to the artist as we head for coffee, no sooner had we crossed over into Brick Lane and we spotted Manyoly on the other side of the street who was also up early to grab some photos of her new work.After a quick catch up over coffee, we headed back out on the streets to shoot the two large works she had installed on Sclater Street and another nearby on Chance Street she had installed late the night before with London artist Neon Savage.Despite our early start, we turned onto Chance Street only to discover the artists' work had been completely covered by series of commercial fly posters that had been pasted up earlier that morning as the poster was still somewhat wet. With the fly poster glue drying quickly with the rising temperature we began striping back the posters covering Manyoly’s work.Removing as much as we could off the wall the colourful piece beneath the posters started to show through. With Manyoly somewhat happy that some of her work was visible again we went to check in on the second piece nearby on Sclater Street, but unfortunately, this too had been completely covered by the same fly posting team! Unlike the first piece through the posters covering this large piece had already dried and were clung to the empty shop window.We proposed heading to Hookedblog HQ and grabbing some brushes and a bucket of water which would enable us to soften the glue and paper and remove the adverts covering her works.After some peeling tearing and scrapping and some questions from some confused onlookers, we successfully managed to remove most of the fly posters giving the artists work another lease of life if only for the few days over the weekend before the fly posters team blitz the neighborhood again with another wave of commercial posters.We of course took some photographs while we were working, check out the pictures below.A London street art tour group stop to take pictures and ask Manyoly what exactly she was doing!With the piece cleaned up, Manyoly finally gets her picture of her work.One-piece finished it was onto the second large piece on Sclater Street to begin the process of removing the posters all over again.Want more Hookedblog, why not subscribe to the newsletter