An exhibition about (street) language on walls

The language applied by artists/artists is based on stylistic features within mural painting. Tags, Pieces, Graffiti (old school), Post-Graffiti, Writing, Lettering, Style writing, Post Writing, Balloon Writing, Calligraffiti, Asemic-Writing, Graffuturism, Text Based Art, etc., there are so many visual expressions based on language, that it is very interesting to devote an exhibition specifically to them. The exhibition connects different (sub)cultural backgrounds belonging to a writing style. The selected artists are exponents of different writing styles.

Artists write history

The participants were asked for their particular writing styles. We also asked them to freely interpret the word history and apply it in their design.

In addition to the exhibition at Murals Inc. (office), within walking distance (150 meters) is ‘Edition Clarity’ on display; a 57 x 5 meter wall on which local Graffiti writers created a mural in collaboration with André Smits / Artist in the world and Surch.

> https://murals-inc.com/exhibition/master-writer

Surch

‘Surch’ is just about the most common tag on the streets of Rotterdam and its surroundings. Once you recognize the tag you can't escape it anymore. Murals Inc. is super content to have this writer inside. It was his first indoor piece and he immediately hit the ground running with a brutalist highlight.

Meanr

Meanr is another graffiti writer you can’t ignore in Rotterdam. On the wall near the entrance, interrupted by a glass wall, he has created a timeline of all his disc styles since 1984 to the present. The timeline itself can be read as a total work of art.

Matteo Ceretto Castigliano / CT

Matteo (Turin, 1985) has been active as a street artist since his childhood. He belongs to a new generation of urban artists (New generation Urban Artists). Early on, he focused on the relationship between mural art and the peripheral landscape and the changes it has brought about within street culture and thinking about murals in outdoor spaces. Matteo has been influenced by the history of graphic design and writing culture. His interest in letters has focused on the elements that make up a letter. His initials, CT, serve as working material.

Nick van Steen / Radical_Only

With this calligraphic mural, Nick van Steen / Radical_Only has depicted the history / evolution of writing in the different eras / scripts. For example, the concept of script & writing originated in Sumer in Mesopotamia. Of course, back then these were not letter forms as we know them today but were more pictograms. These evolved into cuneiform, which in turn evolved further, and further again until we finally get to letter forms that are a little more familiar like the gothic or italic letter. So it's basically a timeline with Mesopotamia as Day 1 of the writing system and lastly its own name, because now, of course, we are in the Radical Era.

Aileen Middel / Mick La Rock

Aileen Middel / Mick La Rock (born Groningen, 1970), is a Dutch visual artist and graffiti writer. She is known as one of the first female graffiti artists in Europe and made a name for herself while making many trips between the graffiti scenes of Amsterdam and New York in the 1990s. She came in contact with hip-hop culture at the age of 13, then put her first piece in the bike basement of her high school in 1985. Her minimalist style shows influences from Brutalism and Russian abstract art of the early 20th century. For the exhibition ‘Master Writer’, she applied her writer's name in a minimalist manner. This consists of six circles that overlap in pairs of two connected by lines. On the rightmost inner circle is an Old Skool graffiti. The whole shows a piece that connects both the past and the present of graffiti writing.

Lars Breuer

Lars Breuer (b. 1974, Aachen, Germany) regularly works with a self-designed grid-like cursive typography. For the exhibition ‘Master Writer’, he chose the text “The past forms the future without regard to live. The text occupies the entire space in the drawing office of the architectural firm. This rhythmic and dynamic composition alternates between the semantics of words and the quality of an abstract pattern.” In this way, the artist works with the existing space that is modified and clearly defined by his interpretations.

Language / text

An exhibition based on language. Every living being uses language, verbal or otherwise; even trees communicate. Language, from superintellectual to conceptual, from theory to street language. In art, language is used in and for a multitude of expressions, from museum-like to urban. The introduction of language into visual art from the early Cubism of Picasso and Braque can be seen as a breaking of the boundaries between high and low culture. Language stood for the low, the world outside art, which in the 20th century had invaded the world of high art. In the 1960s, conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth regarded printed and typed texts as neutral “language use”, the most direct and transparent form of communication. By using language, they wanted to do away with form. This resulted in a further rapprochement between high and low in the 1980s, in which, in a “linguistic turn”, visual artists such as Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Jean-Michel Basquiat incorporated various forms of language into their art. Basquiat began as a graffiti artist where he and his friend Al Diaz applied texts to walls under the name SAMO (same old shit). His socially critical and profound graffiti texts attracted attention. At the time, there were many with him who left their criticism and discontent in the form of tags on walls and train cars.

Style, message and context; the message of street artists is a different one from that of artists. The exhibition 'Master Writer' bridges differences in backgrounds and starting points