Steve Lazarides

Steve Lazarides (Greek: Στηβ Λαζαρίδης; born c. 1969)[1] is a British-Greek Cypriot[2][3] publisher, photographer, collector and curator. He has helped popularise street art and underground art.[4]

Steve Lazarides
Born1969 (age 53–54)
Bristol, United Kingdom
Occupation(s)Gallerist and Art Promoter
Known forOne time associate of Banksy and promoter of street art
Websitelazemporium.com
Steve Lazarides in his West Country studio

Early life

Steve Lazarides grew up in Bristol, England and studied photography at Newcastle Polytechnic.[5] He discovered street subculture and graffiti art as a teenager at Bristol's Barton Hill neighbourhood youth club, organised by John Nation and referenced in 2020 documentary Banksy and the Rise of Outlaw Art.

Art career

In the 1980s, he started out with a Nikon F-mount camera documenting his surrounding environments as a photography student. He subsequently worked as a photographer for Sleazenation, where he was employed as photography director from 1996 till 2001, and The Face. Lazarides documented British sub-cultures and youth movements such as the UK rave scene in the early 1990s; skate culture and the rise of outsider street art.

Commissioned by Sleazenation to photograph Banksy's portrait in 1997, he continued to work with the artist, including as the anonymous artist's driver and photographer, before eventually becoming his gallerist.

Lazarides and Banksy also launched the 'Pictures on Walls' website in 2001 to promote graffiti art, and widened their scope to work with a larger roster of street artists.[6] He created an in-house print studio, Lazarides Editions, and worked with the artists to create prints to share with the art community. The market in street art became commercially successful in 2007 only shortly before the 2008 recession, with Banksy's work, "Laugh Now", selling for £228,000 at auction in early 2008.[6] Andrew Child wrote in the Financial Times, "If there had been one individual responsible for whipping up and sustaining the fever around urban art, and who stood to lose most from its demise, it was Steve Lazarides.".[6]

Lazarides opened up his first gallery in London in 2006, and brought many unknown artists in the UK to light including holding Invader's first UK exhibition, Space Invader's Invasion London and Rubik Bad Men II.[7] Lazarides now represents the portrait painter Jonathan Yeo, the Parisian artist JR, the contemporary English painter Antony Micallef and Portuguese graffiti/street artist Vhils.[8]

In 2009 he moved headquarters from Charing Cross Road into a five-story Georgian townhouse on Rathbone Place, near Oxford Street, with the first exhibition at the new Lazarides Rathbone being of the Portuguese graffiti artist Vhils, which was also the artist's debut UK show.[9] Lazarides Rathbone formed the flagship Lazarides space with Lazarides Editions creating prints in a separate site (situated in Greenwich). In 2016 Lazarides opened Banksy Print Gallery[10] in the Mondrian Hotel on the South Bank. The space centered around Lazarides' time with Banksy and also sold secondary-market Banksy prints. In early 2018 Lazarides moved the space to Mayfair.[11]

Lazarides left the business in September 2019.[12]

Post-Banksy

Lazarides and Banksy parted ways in 2008,[13] in unexplained circumstances.[6]"[14]

Lazarides began to organise shows that "would not look out of place on a Turner Prize shortlist".[6] He pioneered the contemporary 'immersive art' trend with several 'pop-up' shows, including Hell's Half Acre in October 2010, co-curated with actor Kevin Spacey and held in The Old Vic Tunnels beneath Waterloo station, London.[6][15] He returned to the tunnels in 2011 and 2012, with shows titled Minotaur and Bedlam. He held an off-site exhibition in collaboration with The Vinyl Factory in October 2013, titled BRUTAL and taking place at London's 180 The Strand. These pop-up shows have included work by Doug Foster, Conor Harrington, Lucy McLauchlan, Antony Micallef, Karim Zeriahen, Stanley Donwood, Vhils, Todd James and Ian Francis.[16]

Banksy Captured Volumes One and Two

In 2016, Lazarides began curating his personal photography archive of 100,000 images containing roughly 12,000 photographs he took whilst documenting the career of Banksy,[17] and self-published them as two books, Banksy Captured Volume I & Volume II. Lazarides self-distributed the first and second editions of the two volumes, resulting in sales of over 5,000 copies within a month, at the end of 2019.[18] Banksy Captured Volume II, features further photography and commentary, and was published in March 2021. Volume Two includes reportage from Banksy's 2006 Los Angeles exhibition "Barely Legal", images of the artist's unauthorised installation inside London's Natural History Museum during 2004.[19] Banksy Captured Volume I & Volume II were both self-published via Lazarides' Laz Emporium venture.

In 2020 Lazarides appeared as a talking head in Vision Films' documentary Banksy and the Rise of Outlaw Art.[20]

Laz Emporium

Lazarides' current venture is Laz Emporium, selling art prints and homeware using designs from artists including Jamie Hewlett, Jonathan Yeo, Mode 2, Charming Baker, Stash, Teech DDS, and Lazarides' own photography. It includes an online store and a shop across two floors in Soho, London, with a downstairs exhibition space. The items are all made at Lazarides' art, design and craft studio in the West Country.[21]

References
  1. Mikhailova, Anna (13 October 2013). "Steve Lazarides, the gallery owner who backed the street artist, is looking to profit from communist posters". The Sunday Times. Archived from the original on 5 November 2013.(subscription required)
  2. "Steve Lazarides: The Man Behind Banksy". Athens Insider. 10 October 2018. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
  3. "Στηβ Λαζαρίδης, o Ελληνοκύπριος έμπορος τέχνης που ανακάλυψε τον Banksy αποκαλύπτεται". CNN Greece. 13 March 2016. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
  4. Hershkovits, David (31 January 2011). "Live Nation, Tribeca Film Festival and Banksy's Ex-dealer Plan to Challenge Miami Art Basel". PaperMag. Retrieved 2 November 2013 – via The Huffington Post.
  5. Sooke, Alastair (4 August 2007). "A shop window for outsiders". The Telegraph. Retrieved 2 November 2013.
  6. Child, Andrew (28 January 2011). "Urban renewal:Steve Lazarides continues to expand his street art empire". The Financial Times. Retrieved 4 November 2013.
  7. Lazinc, Steve (5 October 2007). "Invader: Space Invader's Invasion London and Rubik Bad Men". LAZ. Retrieved 9 March 2017.
  8. "Artists". LAZ.
  9. Leitch, Luke (11 July 2008). "Steve Lazarides: Graffiti's ?ber-dealer". The Times.
  10. Breen, Matt (25 November 2016). "A Banksy gallery is opening on the South Bank". Time Out London.
  11. Sutherland-Hawes, Charlotte (January 2018). "Lazinc Opens London Flagship with a Head-Turning Installation". Vanity Fair. When you consider the precipitous prices at which Lazarides manages to flog art, the vast, two-storey, 4,000-square-foot space in a cluster of townhouses on Sackville street makes more sense
  12. Shaw, Anny (September 2019). "Banksy's former agent quits gallery world citing snobbery and the death of subculture". The Art Newspaper. It's got to the stage where [the gallery world] is about nothing other than monetary value and I just can't work on those terms any more. It is tough in the middle market too… I maintain that 75% of galleries will be gone within five years. It's too expensive. The only way for them to keep going is from secondary market sales and there's only a finite number of people who can be flipping Warhols and Basquiats.
  13. Smith, Keily (6 June 2014). "Banksy gets unofficial retrospective". BBC News.
  14. Michals, Susan (11 October 2010). "Banksy's Ex-Gallerist Talks About Their Breakup, Depictions of Hell". Vanity Fair. It's like when you're in a relationship and people don't define you as an individual; they define you as a couple. And it annoys him far more than it annoys me. [Laughs] A decade is long time, especially when you're both as driven as we are. It gave me much more capacity to work with everyone else. It was an amazing ride and I wouldn't be here without it, but I don't necessarily miss it.
  15. "Artistic Installations to be Shown in Recently Discovered Labyrinth Beneath London's Waterloo Station". ArtDaily. 11 October 2010. Retrieved 6 November 2013.
  16. Battersby, Matilda (9 October 2012). "Bedlam? You don't have to be mad to work in the arts, but it helps". Independent.co.uk. Retrieved 6 November 2013.
  17. Peplow, Gemma (2 November 2019). "Banksy – the most revealing photo yet? How his former agent documented art's biggest mystery". Sky News.
  18. Jeffries, Stuart (16 December 2019). "'We were lawless!' Banksy's photographer reveals their scams and scrapes". The Guardian.
  19. Moran, Lee (12 September 2020). "Banksy's Ex-Dealer Lifts The Lid on Iconic Blur Cover With Never-Before-Seen Photos". The Huffington Post.
  20. "Banksy and the Rise of Outlaw Art: the new documentary about Banksy". www.deodato.art.
  21. Gerlis, Melanie (7 October 2022). "Pop-up galleries in Beijing free-trade zone and London".
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