WORDS AND PHOTOS WILLIAM PARRY
This month sees Prague's first official graffiti
exhibition, but just how street is this art?
O N T H E
S C E N E
“
IT’S NOT TOTALLY FINISHED YET,”
says one half of How&Nosm in his German-New York
accent, as we look at their massive mural. How&Nosm are twin brothers Raoul and
David. I'm not sure which is which; both are tattooed, with short hair and beards
that seem to grow in tandem. Their work is a visual labyrinth riddled with recurring
motifs of birds, arrows and playing cards. “Yeah, it's pretty trippy,” David laughs.
In the adjacent room another vast mural takes shape. It's an industrial
landscape under attack; police cars overturned and burning – a typically hard-
hitting piece fromM-City, a graffiti artist from Gdansk. Around me, the air is
heavy with spray-paint fumes, the floor littered with cans and lids, cardboard
and balls of paint-flecked masking tape.
City Gallery Prague's usual genteel punters wouldn’t recognise this
prestigious space, so transformed is it for the opening of Stuck on the City,
Prague's first ‘official’ (i.e. municipally-sponsored) graffiti exhibition. Seventeen
of the world’s top artists, including How&Nosm, Swoon and M-City – and seven
local talents, including co-organiser Point, Spino and Xdog – are here to paint the
town, while gallery organisers have lined up interactive workshops and talks to
reach out beyond the usual gallery-visitor profile.
For most of the international street artists participating, it’s a welcome, newly
legitimate, return to a city that they have fondly – and illegally – tagged on previous
visits, while street-art lovers get a chance to enjoy work by some of the biggest names
in the genre in a purpose-built curated space, just minutes from the Old Town.
But is it all a bit
too
convenient? Purists might argue that this kind of blockbuster street-
art exhibition takes away from the roots of the genre, raising what one might term "exi-stencil"
questions about its very existence. Do cosy gallery set-ups negate the artists' right to invoke
chaos? Even Klára Voskovcová, one of the organisers of the show, acknowledges that by engaging
with street art’s trendiness, “nobody knows if we are killing or helping it”.
Over my three-day visit, as the gallery evolves into a kaleidoscopic warren of idiosyncratic graffiti, I get
a chance to ask the artists themselves, who explain that exhibitions and commercial commissions aren't an
alternative to, but a natural extension of, their street work. “For me there isn’t a warring binary. Inside a gallery space you
get to spend a lot of time and really create an environment of your own," says New York-based Swoon. M-City says both urban
environments and galleries are enjoyable but “in the gallery it’s just more decorative”.
Until 13 January, visitors to Prague will get a chance to judge the works for themselves. As for the artists, a walk through the streets is
Writing on thewall
tagging and bombing while they're here, keeping it real.
Stuck on the City at City Gallery Prague, Valentinská 1, Praha 1;
stuckonthecity.cz
enough to show me that many of them have resorted to a little illegal
