The Art behind Streetwear

An exhibition of four masters of street art and their influence on street-wear.

With the Double H Pavilion, curators Lucas Carrieri and Enrico Arcangeli seek to explore the origins of street wear and street aesthetics by bringing together ‒ for the first time in over two decades ‒ four masters of graffiti and street art. The influence of these artists on the now omnipresent street fashion is undeniable, though many Berliners as well as fashion lovers are not always aware of the beginnings of the graffiti art movement.

For this special occasion, four giants of street art ‒ DELTA, MODE 2, ERON and SHARP ‒ will be showing their work side by side.

The exhibition is a part of the five week urban art festival Urban Affairs Extended and will take place from the 1th until the 31th of July, 2009. The DOUBLE H pavilion is an official art event of the Bread & Butter fair,

The Origins

When graffiti artists first started leaving their mark on our urban city-scapes, theirs was a risky and unthankful endeavour. Sneaking into subway tunnels, climbing over walls and hanging from rooftops, these pioneers of urban art were expressing an entire generation’s outrage at the confining and suffocating greyness of our cities.

Working with nothing but spray cans and waste, they would create short-lived masterpieces on ugly walls, iron trains, deserted streets. Always running the risk of getting caught, these artists would work under pseudonyms. The streets soon became the site of territorial “tag wars,” and the tags have become an art form on its own right.

Most of these early graffiti artists never enjoyed widespread recognition; when graffiti slowly became an integral part of our urban lives, many were no longer alive. They were rediscovered posthumously by a younger generation of graffiti and street art fans and new artists, and their art found its way into more accepted art forms. Nowadays, street-art can be seen hanging in renowned galleries across the world. It is also the topic of numerous films, books and videos. It is inseparable from our aesthetic in general, and from our fashion in particular.

Street wear labels have long been working closely with the aesthetic ideas introduced by graffiti ‒ labels work closely with graffiti artists to design their logos, the use of strong, neon colors. Even the oversize cuts are taken from the silhouettes of graffiti figures, with their caps, large sneakers and baggy clothes!

With the exhibition The Art behind Streetwear we seek to turn the spotlight on some of these early street artists. Before a line becomes a logo, before a shape becomes a model for garments, there is an artistic instance that emerges from the street. The exhibition will present four internationally renowned artists, each from different country. While the urban desolation they express stems from various cities (Amsterdam, London, Rimini and New York) the fact remains that streets across the world are alienating in a specific manner that is evident in these artists’ work.

With the omnipresence of street art in our daily routine and with the rise of graffiti from a criminal act to a highly codified form of expressive art, The Art behind Streetwear is a delightful return to the masters of graffiti and a rare occasion for their Berlin fans to view new works. By coinciding with the Berlin fashion fair Bread and Butter, street wear fans and designers alike will get a wider view on the artistic origins of street fashion.

DELTA

Boris Tellegen (NL), aka DELTA, is one of the most well respected old-school writers from Amsterdam. He studied Industrial Design Engineering and emerged with a unique painting style: his abstract lettering resembles isometric plans for high-tech vehicles or architecture from the future. He has influenced writers worldwide for decades with his 3D letter styles.

Working primarily in the field of graffiti painting, Delta significantly transforms both the traditional presentation mode of visual art, as well as the genre of graffiti painting itself. With his graphic / architecturally inspired and visually spectacular work, he skilfully experiments with a variety of mediums, in order to create his paintings, prints, 3D sculptures and installations. His graffiti-inspired aesthetic found its way into mediums such as graphic design, 3-D canvas, and architecture.
Delta's fine art paintings and sculptures have recently been exhibited in Singapore, Malaysia, London and Italy.

MODE 2

MODE 2 is ‒ like Graffiti itself ‒ a phenomenon. Not only his work in past and present reveal him as a central figure within European graffiti, but also his charisma makes him one of the most interesting characters of the scene with role-model potential. The thinking man of the British graffiti movement has recently returned from self-exile in Paris. Like seminal comic 2000AD if it had ever managed to get laid, Mode's work is immediately refreshing due to its lack of posturing and antagonism, concentrating instead on very different themes (friendship! Love! Dancing! The later stages of pregnancy!).

Mode was recently made artist-in-residence at Coco de Mer, the peerless erotic emporium masterminded by Sam Roddick, daughter of Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, where he has developed an offshoot style fusing his graffiti-based art with more traditional portraiture. He paints customers from his vantage point of a cubbyhole in the changing rooms (with their prior request, of course).

ERON

Eron was born in Rimini, Italy in 1973 to a French mother and an Italian father. He attended the Art Institute in Urbino and Riccione. In 1988 he began to practice street writing and spray can art and was elected best Italian street artist in 1994. His artistic research is currently focused on portraits and landscapes realized with spray cans on canvas, mixing expressionism and realism within the same art work, obtaining an unusual aesthetic impact. The subjects of his works often express thoughts on social themes and on the act of “drawing” as an innate instinct of the human being to communicate.

SHARP

In his youth, Sharp served an apprenticeship on the 6 line of the IRT where he challenged the industrial power of 600 miles of steel and machinery running like a blood vessel through the city, blasting through the tunnels and thundering along the “el” over miles of rubble where apartment buildings once stood.

Sharp with his partner Delta wrested the Pelham Bay Express from the hegemonic grip of Madseen, UA. They proclaimed “We are here, we will not be ignored.”

They were on hand to be major players in the last years of significant aerosol painting on the legendary trains of New York. Those years saw the end of the old culture of innocent creation and achievement that brightened the destroyed city, turning deferred-maintenance wrecks into brilliant canvases that put a new face on the concept of public ownership.

The story is one of owning nothing, yet owning it all, infusing the faceless grid with your own identity, your own spirit, finding freedom that transcends captivity, giving form and color as medicine for a community in pain.

Sharp's paintings today carry this entire heritage in their DNA. The elegant, proliferating wild-style lettering is in dynamic tension with the grid and calls the background to life; a visual metaphor in which the energy of the soul finds expression in the circumstances of the given life.