25 June - 10 October 2010

With its major summer exhibition The Street as Studio. From Basquiat to Banksy, the Kunsthalle Wien will bring the rough style of the street into the exhibition hall and focus on the dynamic sphere of production of a both urban and mobile generation of contemporary artists who draw on the metropolis as their source of inspiration.

The historical center of gravity and starting point for the show are the two US painters Jean-Michel Basquiat und Keith Haring whose works are implicitly or explicitly reinterpreted as landmark references for the changing forms of street culture and urban art. The exhibition is pivoted on an air fuelled by the street and urbanity, on a vitality and drive that have found expression not only in Basquiat’s oeuvre and his joint projects with Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente, but also in the works of contemporary artists such as Sol LeWitt, Sophie Calle, Blek le Rat, or Futura 2000. In New York’s graffiti scene of the late 1970s, Basquiat aka Samo (same old shit), who decorated his tags with crowns and was at home in the rap, hip-hop, and scratching scene, was already considered “King of the City.” The subversive visual language of urban art has not ceased to enter into pop culture. It includes a political dimension which deals with the quest for identity, like in the case of Basquiat, and spans to the expression of fights for survival determined by social injustice and class struggles.

In the exhibition, the slogan “Reclaim the Street!” relates to the numerous strategies of urban “resistance movements” and may also be found as a programmatic approach characteristic of more recent positions such as those of Kader Attia, Ari Marcopoulos, Christian Eisenberger, as well as declared street art figures such as Banksy, Evan Roth, Blu, and Mark Jenkins, who thematize the visual appearance of their urban environs and have repeatedly criticized the increasing global invasion of the private and the surveillance of the common public space in their works.
Curators: Cathérine Hug, Thomas Mießgang
Source: Press release