For decades, graffiti, street art, and contemporary art have spoken with one another, exchanging ideas, aesthetics, techniques, and attitudes along the way.

Opening September 19 at Kunsthal Helmond in the Netherlands, Deep Rooted: The Impact of Graffiti on Art takes a thoughtful look at graffiti not simply as a style or historical movement, but as a fertile city dirt from which remarkably different artistic practices have grown. Drawing in part from the collection of Museum Helmond—one of the first European museums to collect works by graffiti artists—the exhibition begins with New York pioneers who brought the language of the street and subway onto canvas in the 1980s, then follows those roots into contemporary practices encompassing photography, performance, public intervention, activism, and explorations of technology.

As the museum puts it, graffiti here is presented as “a starting point rather than an end point or fixed style.”

Guest curator Jasper van Es brings considerable firsthand knowledge of graffiti culture and an inquisitive curatorial approach to the subject, making connections institutions have sometimes struggled to articulate. Those connections are important: graffiti’s influence on contemporary art extends far beyond aerosol, lettering, and the wall itself, into ways of thinking about authorship, repetition, documentation, visibility, technology, and who gets to intervene in public space.

By standing some foundational New York figures alongside artists whose work has moved into very different territories, Deep Rooted proposes graffiti as a cultural practice capable of generating ideas and methods—not merely an aesthetic to be borrowed. Or, in the museum’s words, it is “more than paint on a wall or an aesthetic visual language. It is also a way to approach the city.”

Deep Rooted runs September 19, 2026 through February 7, 2027 at Kunsthal Helmond, F.J. van Thielpark 7, Helmond.

Artists: Blade (USA), Vincent de Boer (NL), Joe Conzo (USA), Crash (USA), Brad Downey (USA), Epos 257 (CZ), Futura 2000 (USA), Sigma Megaforce (NL), Edward Nightingale (GER), NOC 167 (USA), Phase II (USA), Quik (USA), Rammellzee (USA), Ralph Roelse (NL), Seen (USA), Thomas Trum (NL), Utah (USA), Caroline Vercruysse (BE), Dondi White (USA), and Zephyr (USA).

Guest curator: Jasper van Es

For more information about this exhibition, details about the opening, hours and directions click HERE