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.