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The story of graffiti is usually told as a journey from the street to the museum. The last part of ICONS, Graffiti Meets Contemporary Art, tells it from the other direction. It asks what happened when painters trained in art schools, in Berlin, Paris, London and the United States, began looking hard at the city around them: its walls, its trucks, its logos and its trains.

The six artists in this section arrived at that question at different moments, from the 1960s to the 2010s. Their answers are very different. What they share is the recognition that the visual language of the street was not something to be kept outside the studio.

Peter Klasen: the backs of trucks

Peter Klasen was born in Lübeck in 1935, studied in Berlin and settled in Paris in 1959. In the early 1960s he was one of the founders of Nouvelle Figuration, the movement also known as Figuration Narrative, whose painters took the signs and images of modern consumer society as their subject. From the early 1970s he began painting the backs of trucks and wagons, grilles and chains, marked with numbers, letters and warning signs, in a series about confinement. A stay in New York in 1981 brought drips, wear and graffiti into his surfaces, and in the 1980s he made a series of canvases from graffiti he photographed on the Berlin Wall.

Hervé Di Rosa and Kenny Scharf: Paris, 1984

In 1981, in Paris, Hervé Di Rosa, born in Sète in 1959, co-founded Figuration Libre with Robert Combas, Rémi Blanchard and François Boisrond. It was painting fed by comics, rock music and popular imagery, and it took its name from the artist Ben. After receiving a Médicis Foundation award in 1983, Di Rosa spent two years living and exhibiting in New York.

In New York, Kenny Scharf had arrived as a student at the School of Visual Arts and become part of the East Village scene around Club 57, alongside Keith Haring. His paintings filled with cartoon characters and space-age fantasy, and in 1981 he showed customised household appliances, covered in the same exuberant imagery.

The two scenes met in 5/5 Figuration Libre, France/USA at the ARC, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which ran from December 1984 to February 1985 and placed French painters beside New York artists including Scharf, Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and CRASH. ICONS brings that meeting back: CRASH on the first floor, Di Rosa upstairs. Di Rosa went on to develop the idea of “modest art”, founded the Musée International des Arts Modestes in Sète in 2000, and was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2022.

Damien Hirst: the machine and the maid

While still a student at Goldsmiths in London, Damien Hirst organised Freeze (1988), the exhibition that launched the generation later known as the Young British Artists. In 1992 he began his spin paintings, pouring paint onto a turning surface so that the machine, not the hand, decides where the colour goes, a technique Hirst traces back to a spin-art demonstration he saw on children’s television.

Graffiti met Hirst’s work directly in 2007. For Keep It Spotless, Banksy sprayed onto one of Hirst’s spot paintings a figure of a maid, lifting the rows of dots like a curtain to sweep something underneath. The collaboration sold at a charity auction at Sotheby’s New York in February 2008. It placed a street artist’s stencil on the surface of a studio icon, and made the conversation between the two worlds impossible to miss.

Katherine Bernhardt: the spray can on the studio floor

Katherine Bernhardt also trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her early paintings of the 2000s took models from fashion magazines as their subject. She later turned to the ordinary objects and pop icons of everyday life: cigarettes, sneakers, fruit, the Pink Panther. She draws them first in spray paint on an upright canvas, then lays the canvas face up on the floor and floods it with thinned acrylic, letting the paint pool, run and drip. The spray can, the tool of the writer, is where her paintings begin.

Robert Nava: traffic as a gallery

Robert Nava was born in East Chicago, Indiana, in 1985 and completed an MFA in painting at Yale in 2011. For years afterwards in New York he drove trucks and moved furniture, and sat in traffic looking at the backs of the trucks in front of him. He began a series of paintings of those rectangles, and slowly the trucks turned into faces, and then into the creatures, angels and monsters his work is known for today. He paints fast, in spray paint, acrylic and grease pencil.

Klasen in Paris in the 1970s, Nava in New York some forty years later: two painters, on two continents, finding a picture in the back of a truck.

A conversation, not a conclusion

None of these six artists came up through the subway yards, and ICONS does not present them as writers. Their place in the exhibition is as the other side of a conversation that has been running for more than forty years: painters taking the city’s marks seriously, while the writers downstairs took the city itself as their canvas. On the second floor of ICONS, their work shares the rooms with the international writers and street artists of Parts III to V, so the conversation continues across the whole floor.

Before graffiti had galleries, it had a timetable. In New York in the early 1970s, a name written on a subway car did not stay where it was painted. It pulled out of the station, crossed boroughs, ran under rivers and came back again, seen by thousands of passengers who never set out to look at art. The subway was the first exhibition space the movement ever had, and it came with its own map.

That map appears again and again in ICONS. TAKI 183, Dr. Revolt and Skeme all have works in the exhibition painted directly onto New York City subway and transit maps, and Blade draws over a photograph of a painted train. Seen together, they show writers who made their names on the system now working on the picture of the system itself.

TAKI 183: the name that went everywhere

TAKI 183 was a teenager from Washington Heights, in upper Manhattan. His tag joined TAKI, short for the Greek name Dimitraki, to 183, the street where he lived. He worked as a foot messenger, and wherever the job took him across the city, he wrote his name. On 21 July 1971 The New York Times published a story about him, and the paper described other young writers who were already following his example. The idea of being known across the whole city, rather than on a single block, spread quickly through all five boroughs.

For visitors in Cyprus there is a particular thread here: one of the founding names of graffiti belongs to a Greek-American, and it grew out of a Greek family nickname. His work in the exhibition, NYC Subway Map (2019), is painted in aerosol and acrylic on a map of the network his name once travelled.

Dr. Revolt: from the Broadway line to all-city

Dr. Revolt began writing in the 1970s and was an original member of the Rolling Thunder Writers (RTW), a crew formed in 1977 whose members painted their first full-colour pieces on the Broadway local line, the No. 1 train. He became known there for bright pieces with a psychedelic, comic-book energy, before taking his name across the city. He went on to contribute to Wild Style and Style Wars, the two films that carried New York graffiti to audiences far beyond the city.

Both of his works in ICONS, Diabolic Doctor Revolt and Revolt Map, are painted in spray paint and acrylic on subway maps.

Skeme: a return after twenty-eight years

Skeme started writing as a teenager at the end of the 1970s. In 1980 he moved from the insides of the trains to the outsides, painting pieces, whole cars and throw-ups, and worked alongside writers including DAZE and the pioneer PHASE 2. He appeared, together with his mother, in Style Wars (1983). Soon after the filming he joined the United States Army, where he served for twenty-eight years. When he retired in 2010, he found many of his old partners still painting, and he picked up the spray can again.

His work Raid!!!! (2020) is painted in aerosol on a New York City transit map: a writer who left the trains in the early 1980s, returning to the same network on paper almost four decades later.

Blade: drawing over the photograph

Blade, who grew up in the Bronx, is credited with painting more than 5,000 trains between 1972 and 1984, and his whole cars set a standard that other writers tried to match. His trains were photographed by Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper, whose book Subway Art (1984) took New York graffiti to readers around the world. Chalfant developed a way of photographing trains in sequence, so that an entire painted car could be recorded in one image.

In CRAZY 5 Again (2016), Blade works in marker and paint marker on a print of one of Chalfant’s train photographs. The title names his crew, The Crazy 5, formed in the Bronx in the early 1970s. The crew was later rebuilt by SEEN as The Cool 5, keeping the initials TC5, with Lady Pink among its members.

Why the map

The map is an object with its own history. Massimo Vignelli’s elegant diagram of 1972 proved hard for passengers to use and was replaced in 1979 by a more geographic design from Michael Hertz Associates, which remained the official map until a new design arrived in April 2025. It is among the most familiar printed images in New York, made for everyone who rides the trains.

That is what makes it such a fitting surface. A canvas belongs to the studio. A subway map belongs to the public, to strangers in transit, to the same audience the first writers reached without ever being invited. Painting on it brings the work back to where it began. On the first floor of ICONS, these works hang among the writers of Graffiti Pioneers and The New York Subway Movement, the generation that turned a transit system into a place to be seen.