Illegal. Street Art Graffiti 1960 – 1995
In the organizer's words:
From May 18, 2024, the Historisches Museum Saar will be showing the exhibition "ILLEGAL. Street Art Graffiti 1960 - 1995". Groundbreaking works from the beginnings of American and European street art and graffiti history will be presented. The focus is on early illegal works. With its historical approach and visually stunning, immersive presentation, the exhibition at the Historisches Museum Saar is the first of its kind anywhere in the world.
On display are key works and rarities that have never been shown, which were created illegally, i.e. without the permission of others and without commercial intentions, for an audience on the street. The selection of 120 artists from over a dozen countries is the result of extensive and lengthy research. Their works were never intended for a museum and are therefore - with a few exceptions - not preserved in the original. Nevertheless, the Historisches Museum Saar has managed to track down originals and bring them to Saarbrücken. The most distant loan comes from California.
The show begins with the groundbreaking works of Brassaï, a renowned photographer and companion of Picasso. Brassaï was one of the first artists to see graffiti as more than just a spontaneous form of street art. He recognized it as a significant form of artistic expression that was worthy of being documented and presented in galleries. His graffiti photographs, first exhibited in Stuttgart in 1960, marked a significant turning point in the perception and recognition of this art form. In terms of content, the exhibition ends in 1995, the year in which Banksy's first works appeared in England.
A central focus of the exhibition is on specific geographical locations and regions that played a decisive role in the development of street art and the graffiti scene. One such place is the narrow alleyway Rue Visconti in Paris, which became a hotspot for unauthorized artworks between 1962 and 1986. Renowned artists such as Christo, Daniel Buren and Zlotykamien left their mark here and had a decisive influence on the development of this creative movement. There is a particular focus on the Paris-Düsseldorf-Zurich triangle. It was here, and not in metropolises such as Berlin, Rome or Madrid, that key developments in the history of European street art and graffiti took place. The inclusion of international original loans, as well as regional players, also addresses the greater region.
This content has been machine translated.Location
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