23 November 2011 Last updated at 08:14

In Pictures: Evol street art

Installation outside the Port of London Authority building in Charterhouse Street, EC1

The first UK exhibition of Berlin-based artist Evol is being staged at the Pictures On Walls gallery in Shoreditch, east London.

Using stencils and spray paint, the artist creates tiny cityscapes on the surfaces of familiar urban objects like electrical boxes, walls and concrete blocks. He tells the BBC: "I started out with graffiti and I still use spray paint. It started because I was too lazy to clean brushes and mix colours myself."

(Left) Blokk G1-25, 2010 painted on an electrical box in Stavanger, Norway. (Right) Another city block design

Evol, who rejects the term "street artist", explains his use of outside structures, saying: "They have been under the influence of weather and dirt. It's the same with the buildings, they change with time." Some of his art itself been graffitied. He says: "If the small buildings collect tags of people I don't know, I'm quite happy to see people have interacted with it."

This installation is based on a commission created in 2007 for the Flamingo Beach art-hotel in Berlin. Evol says: "I didn't grow up in a block but for me it's an architectural and social question. They have a special history, especially in the former eastern part of Germany. It was meant to be this social utopia with cheap flats for everyone and the same standards of living but it was a dystopia."

He goes on: "It is harsh planning in my eyes, moving all the lower class people to the city borders. In every city, you find these blocks. So, for me, it's putting them back into the city centres in miniature." One of his installations was created in a former slaughterhouse in Dresden. The entire complex, still thick with the reek of rotten meat, is due to be demolished.

Playing with the notion of low-income housing and the theme of the discarded and unwanted, Evol also uses "the chapest and most used" material consisting of old scraps and bits of cardboard for his canvases, creating photo-realistic paintings.

(Left) Gerichtstr, 2010 (Right) Flamingo Beach - Later

"It's a play on the materials," he says. "Cardboard surrounds things that people actually want to have. They don't care about the packaging and don't treat it well so it gets dirty. I paint on the things that people throw away."

A workman rests on the installation at the Port of London Authority building

While Banksy and Shepard Fairey have brought street art to the attention of the art establishment, Evol says its popularity really derives from the public: "I think it's a generational thing. There are so many young people doing art in public spaces so, for me, it's no wonder that this has grown in acceptance". A Site for Eye Sores opens to the public on 1 December.

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In Pictures: Evol street art

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