The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presented in Paris “Born in the Streets — Graffiti”, on view until November 29, 2009.

Occupying the entire gallery space of the Fondation Cartier, as well as the building’s façade and surrounding garden, the exhibition brings to light the extraordinary development of an artistic movement that was born in the streets of New York in the early 1970s to rapidly become a worldwide phenomenon.

Today, graffiti has entered the cultural mainstream, crossing over to the realms of studio art, design and advertising. Yet, despite its immense popularity, this essentially illegal activity continues to evolve at the periphery of the contemporary art world, its origins and history little-known to the general public.

The exhibition attempts to sketch the general contours of a subject that is vast and complex, a form of expression that has come to embrace many different techniques, ideas and styles.
Tracing the origins of the graffiti movement and offering a panorama of the diversity of contemporary writing, the exhibition provides the public with the opportunity to rediscover an art both ubiquitous and continually evolving, and thus relate to the city in a new way.

In order to demonstrate the contemporary vitality of graffiti as well as its diversity of forms and styles, the Fondation Cartier has asked ten artists from different countries to create works and ephemeral installations specifically for the exhibition. Chosen for the singularity of their approach and the force of their artistic vision, Basco Vazko, Cripta, JonOne, Olivier Kosta- Théfaine, Barry McGee, Nug, Evan Roth, Boris Tellegen/Delta, Vitché, and Gérard Zlotykamien present their work within the Fondation Cartier’s gallery spaces as well as on its glass façade.

Through an important program of documentaries and films, the exhibition also shows how graffiti is practiced within the urban environment. These films focus on graffiti in action and bring to light the great variety of current writing styles and techniques. The documentary, Pixo, screened for the first time in the exhibition, presents an extraordinary form of graffiti that has developed uniquely in Brazil, known as pixação.

Images:
1. São Paulo, 2009. Photos © João Wainer
2. New York, 1973. Photo © Jon Naar, 2009
3. P.H.A.S.E. 2, 2009 © P.H.A.S.E. 2
4. Vitché, São Paulo, 2006 © Vitché
5. Barry McGee, Untitled, non dated © Barry McGee
6. Dondi, Untitled, 1983 © Estate of Dondi White. Henk and Leonie Pijnenburg collection
7. Nug, Sweden, 2009 © Nug
8. Boris Tellegen, Installation done with the participation of local children on the façade of the Jan Cunen Museum during a Jon Naar exhibition, Oss, the Netherlands, 2005 © 2005 Boris Tellegen. Photos © 2005 Michal Butink