Museion, Bolzano
March 29 - September 14, 2025
Centraal Museum, Utrecht
upcoming
Museion’s landmark exhibition about the relationship between graffiti and contemporary fine art. The first museum exhibition in Italy to investigate the art history of spray paint, Graffiti focuses on how the visual vernacular of the city and the street has entered the studio. Above all, the show contends that graffiti is a way of seeing and experiencing urban landscapes.
Bringing together transdisciplinary works from across a 70 year period, the show centers on an approach that moves beyond the historization of graffiti as an “outsider” practice.
Beginning with pre-graffiti spray paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, the exhibition unfolds through works by renowned graffiti writers of the 1980s, and contemporary artists who implement graffiti into their diverse practices.Graffiti takes – as its point of departure – works from the 1950s and 1960s by artists such as Hedda Sterne, David Smith, Martin Barré, Dan Christensen, Carol Rama, and Charlotte Posenenske. In juxtaposition are spray paint on canvas works by seminal graffiti writers such as Rammellzee, Futura 2000, Blade, and Lee Quiñones. A selection of significant 1980s and 1990s paintings, which clearly reference or incorporate graffiti, by Lady Pink & Jenny Holzer, Martin Wong & LA2, and Keith Haring, is followed by more recent examples of spray paintings by Heike-Karin Föll, Michael Krebber, and Christopher Wool. Digital tag drawings by Georgie Nettell meet Patricia L. Boyd’s photogram of a bus shelter and Karin Sander’s Patina Paintings, among many other works. This part of the exhibition further includes artworks by contemporary graffiti writers such as Kunle Martins and WANTO, and a new piece by N.O.Madski in dialogue with sculptures by KAYA.
IMAGE CREDITS:
Hedda Sterne, Untitled, 1955, oil and spray paint on canvas, 42 in. x 34 in., Collection of The Hedda Sterne Foundation, New York
Graffiti, exhibition views, Museion Bolzano/Bozen, 29.03.2025 – 14.09.2025 Photo: Lineematiche – L. Guadagnini, © Museion