“I didn’t know Christian and Patrick personally at the beginning of the project,” says graffiti writer/artist EGS, “but then we met and went spraying together.”
So many relationships on the street begin as easily, but this one is in service of a greater contemporary art effort – The Versus Project.
Now unveiling Part 2 of their collaborative canvasses exhibition here at Urban Nation’s special project space, Munich’s Patrick Hartl and Christian Hundertmark (C100) have combined their more painterly efforts as Layer Cake since 2015.
Reaching out to long-term and newer associates from the graffiti scene, they have been trading canvasses and ideas, and techniques for the last few years to discover how to work with others in a unique collaboration quest.
“The work on the canvases was very slow,” says EGS in the printed description of his participation in this second exhibition here. “One applied a layer of paint and then waited months again until it went on. But I wanted to take this time because the project was very close to my heart.”
“I’m super happy with the finished paintings and don’t even know who painted what in the end – that feels super. Working on the canvases together and sending them by mail seems extremely important to me in this age of digitalization, where everything is about speed It’s nice to send and receive art that’s measured by weight – not gigabytes.”
Here is a selection of the canvasses on display in the gallery now – each has its own fusion of minds and methods, an encoded presentation that contains the mark of two, presented as one. “In this way, an artistic dialogue is created,” say the project leads, “the canvases become the platform for a discussion on a painterly level – in this case by artists currently or formerly active in style writing from different generations, countries, and continents.”
The Versus Project 2 presented by Urban Nation and Layer Cake is currently open to the general public at Urban Nation Project Space in Berlin. Click HERE for additional information.
The brilliant Patrick Hartl & Christian Hundertmark (C100) have been at the graffiti/street art/contemporary art nexus for much of the last decade, delineating the boundaries, and then artfully shifting them.
A multi-year project now welcoming guests at Urban Nation’s Special Projects space in Berlin reveals the imprecision of terminologies and commonly-used nomenclature in this period of hyper-hybridization.
Mick La Rock/Aileen Middel VERSUS Layer Cake. Versus Project. Urban Nation Berlin. (photo courtesy of UN/layer Cake)
When you consider the volley of influences that bounce and collide on metro cars and street walls and digital screens these days, it makes sense to describe the experimentation now afoot as a dialogue. As the Munich-based duo called Layer Cake, the two artists have been doing exactly that with one another’s art for a half dozen years.
“One begins to paint, the other reacts,” say Hartl and Hundertmark in their recent interview for the UN website. “Thus (we) conduct an artistic dialogue. The marker asks a question, the paint can answers, the brush completes or provokes,” they say, “until both artists agree that the mural is finished.”
It is not an automatic process for graffiti writers to create work this way; as one of the basic tenets of the street, you don’t go over someone else’s work unless you mean to show disrespect or provoke a battle.
Drawing upon an eclectic selection of participants with experience on the street, the two act as curators of the new show called ‘Versus’. The rules are similar to their personal practice – produce a collaborative piece with another artist whose style and references may not match yours directly – with each contributor agreeing when the piece is complete.
The clashing and crashing can be seen on the canvass as each new addition rebalances the abstraction, and not everyone was sure it would work.
Bisco Smith VERSUS Layer Cake. Versus Project. Urban Nation Berlin. (photo courtesy of UN/layer Cake)
Artist Flavien Demarigny hesitated to participate versus Layer Cake because he wasn’t sure if he could work with their style that often incorporates calligraffiti techniques, he says. “As it is a major ingredient of Layer Cake‘s visual language I wasn’t sure if I was the right fit for it,” he says in a Facebook post.
“Then I remembered this is precisely what collaborations are about: pushing your limits, opening your perception, and create together new horizons. As a result, we started three collaborative pieces and one came out fantastic, which we decided to present in this show. Their choice of sticking to the repetitive pattern of my style was the wise one, so the two vocabularies can interact, as accidents make it unexpected and create the poetry of it.”
Dave The Chimp VERSUS Layer Cake. Versus Project. Urban Nation Berlin. (photo courtesy of UN/layer Cake)
With 13 different artists passing canvasses back and forth – each adding and subtracting, obliterating and augmenting, they say that at the root of the process was a rule not to consult, but rather, react.
The results fairly wrestle under the constraints, each cutting forward, marking and gesturing and claiming space on the canvass. These works illustrate the tension you may associate with the harshly pounding street in cities, sometimes still glittering insistently despite the struggle.
Usugrow VERSUS Layer Cake. Versus Project. Urban Nation Berlin. (photo courtesy of UN/layer Cake)
“It is not easy to make an intervention in someone else’s painting,” says graffiti style-writing veteran Mick La Rock of her ingrained hesitancy during the art-making process. “You want to avoid taking the painting over and make it your own style. Every part I added to the painting was thought over at least ten times before painting it,” she says in an interview for the show.
On view in the Special Projects room near the museum, “Versus” is a sharp reminder of the community that joins together on walls and surfaces all over the world. Each style challenges the one next to it, sometimes holds it accountable, other times revealing its true nature. The curators say “The Versus Project is an artistic experiment in communication, challenging dialogue, the struggle for a final form.”
Chaz Bojorquez VERSUS Layer Cake. Versus Project. Urban Nation Berlin. (photo courtesy of UN/layer Cake)Wandal VERSUS Layer Cake. Versus Project. Urban Nation Berlin. (photo courtesy of UN/layer Cake)Flavien VERSUS Layer Cake. Versus Project. Urban Nation Berlin. (photo courtesy of UN/layer Cake)Layer Cake. Versus Project. Urban Nation Berlin. (photo courtesy of UN/layer Cake)
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Layer Cake (Patrick Hartl und Christian Hundertmark aka C100), Chaz Bojorquez (Los Angeles / US), Mick La Rock / Aileen Middel (Amsterdam / NL), Sebastian Wandl (München / DE), Dave the Chimp (Berlin / DE), Bisco Smith (New York / US), Vincent Abadie Hafez (Zepha) (Toulouse / FR), Formula 76 (Hamburg / DE), Usugrow (Tokio / JP), Bust (Basel / CH), Jake (Amsterdam / NL), Egs (Helsinki / FI), Imaone (Tokio / JP) und Flavien (Apt / FR).
“The Versus Project” curated by Layer Cake is currently open to the general public at the Urban Nation Project Space. The exhibition will be on view until December 31, 2021. Click HERE to find more information about the exhibition, Covid protocols, and schedule.
Project space of the URBAN NATION Museum, Bülowstrasse 97, 10783 Berlin
Fully booked and fully celebrated, the weekend long celebration of the Martha Cooper career retrospective opened with great success and great reviews as it has been heavily covered by media in print, online, and radio. Because of Covid restrictions the museum can only accommodate a certain number of guests at a time but so far all tickets have been claimed each day. Please be sure if you are going to grab a free ticket online at Urban Nations’ website.
We wish to extend a heartfelt thank you to photographer and BSA collaborator Nika Kramer for sharing her photos with us.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening : 1. “Martha Cooper : Taking Pictures” Opening Night in Berlin at UN 2. Behind the Scenes home video from Nika Kramer
BSA Special Feature: “Martha Cooper : Taking Pictures” Opening Night in Berlin at UN
The exhibition is open!
Our sincere gratitude to Martha Cooper and all of the team who worked so hard to make this event happen at Urban Nation Museum (UN) in Berlin during this difficult year of Covid. We will thank them more in detail soon, but for now please enjoy the official LiveStream of “Martha Cooper: Taking Pictures”, directed by René Kaestner and his A-1 team at Red Tower Films, along with our eloquent hosts, Mick La Rock (Aileen Middel) and Falk Schacht .
“Martha Cooper : Taking Pictures” Opening Night in Berlin at UN. Behind the scenes footage via Nika Kramer
Amsterdam rocked the decks this month to celebrate urban contemporary art and street art in the Netherlands with visual and music based events giving artists many platforms to shine.
Graffuturism, a term and movement coined a handful of years ago to describe an intersection of graffiti, street art, and abstract geometry continues to stake out new territory and here were gallery and street exhibitions proffering some of the current practitioners whose work could be described as such.
The 5th Urban Art Festival Amsterdam featured their own collection of Graffuturists from Europe, the United States, and South America including Poesia, the unofficial founder of Graffuturism in a show of works on canvas, prints, drawings on paper, murals and site-specific abstract installations.
Running concurrently was a Stencil Masters show featuring some of the top knife-wielding artists known on the street today along with a few senior early proponents. The diverse program of gallery, street installations and DJs courtesy of the ADE (Amsterdam Dance Event) helped further contextualize the art forms for a wider audience of fans.
An annual mural tradition of non-pretense, New York hosted the 6th Annual Welling Court mural festival this weekend in a working class neighborhood in Queens, thanks to a grassroots couple who hustle to match artists with walls and opportunity. More than a hundred artists, whose styles span the graffiti-urban art-street art spectrum, participate every year in this community event that eschews the creeping fingers of commercial interests and the pontificating tongues of the art critics.
That is not the point here. That’s not why you fell in love with Street Art and the unvarnished expression of the creative spirit.
Thanks to hearty and big-hearted organizers Alison and Garrison Buxton, the selection is as varied as the participants and the neighbors who come out to share home made dishes, music, and personal stories. Invariably the kids are racing around on their bikes and skates, people are meeting artists and posing for selfies, and some of the kids get to try their hand at painting.
So if you want to see what some of the organic art work is on the scene at the moment, walk through this unassuming Queens neighborhood with us and enjoy the real beat of New York. It’s a small selection, but you can get the flavor.
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
