Street Artist: El Bocho

El Bocho is one of Berlin’s most well known street artists.  He originally settled in Frankfurt from Spain but has come to call Berlin home.   He originally worked as an illustrator and typographer by day. You can still find his „legal“ works in newspapers like „Frankfurter Allgemeine“.  His first works in the streets went up in around 1997.  The name, El Bocho, is Mexican and means Little Donkey. El Bocho started, out on the street, like many „street artists“, as a graffiti writer.  Today he works with paste-ups which are recognised from their scale and quality.  Here Street Art Berlin introduces to four major themes in his work.

Little Lucy

Little Lucy, his major character is inspired by an TV-series called: „Little Lucy – Fear of the Streets“ from what was Czechoslovakia , which was running on TV in the 70s.  El Bocho found the Little Lucy character in this series too boring so he decided to make her a little more interesting. As a friend of dark humor El Bocho has given her a new hobby: killing her cat. You can find her cat in a washing maschine, you can find the cat being cooked as a Kebab or merely being microwaved. Little Lucy’s ideas about how to kill her cat are without limitation and she is always finding new ways to get rid of her cat.

Citizens

Besides his taste for black humor, El Bocho is also really romantic.  His next Characters are called „Citizens“. El Bocho paints portraits, usually of woman, which are saying romantic things.  These women are in Love with their City, Berlin.  These pieces are usually the biggest cut-outs he does. Sometimes they are up to 3 metres high and wide. Another fact is that all of his works are drawings, every artwork he does is an original.  El Bocho also uses different kinds of paper for his work, some extremely thin and ephermeral yet always of a very high quality.

CCTV

The next characters are the two chatting CCTV cameras called “Kalle & Bernd”. Kalle & Bernd are observers, and there is just one thing they like more than observing life on the streets. Sometimes they are yelling things like: Kalle: Somebody is ripping of a poster! and Bernd says: „Call the cops Kalle“! Other times they are just talking about the problems that CCTVs have: „One day Bernd, I would love to see the sky“, or Kalle tells of how fell in love with a traffic light.

Poor Hanna

The last caracter called „Poor Hanna“ is pretty unknown. The reason for that is probably the limited ammount of atworks wich can be found in the streets of Berlin.

El Bochos Website & El Bocho on Facebook.