4th UrbanArt Biennale®, Völklinger Ironworks

The central exhibition hall of the 4th UrbanArt Biennale® 2017 is the 100,000-square-meter Burden Hall (Möllerhalle), so to speak the "belly of the hut", built in the early 20th century. In this once-largest concrete plant, the raw materials of the actual blast furnace filling were stored. 

The “Möller”, the mixture for the blast furnace, consisted of ore, sinter, scrap, and lime. The red-brown iron ore stained the concrete walls and gives the hall a unique atmosphere.

At the entrance, you can see the tapered collecting bins. At the end, there are filling mechanisms with slides. When the workers opened the slides, the material shot into the trailer truck. Approximately 15 workers worked in this loud, draughty, and extremely dusty place.

Thomas Baumgärtel, better known as “The Banana Sprayer”, has been producing stencil graffiti since the 1980s. The Pochoriste genre communicates critical social commentary.

Baumgärtel is no different. Alone his choice of motif – “Alles Banane” (“It’s all nonsense!”), reflects his rebellious attitude.

12,000 tons of material were stored in the 20 collecting bins of the Burden Hall. The raw materials were transported by rail. The railway tracks are still clearly visible. The loading of the material from a certain height filled the hall with ore dust.

Les Francs Colleurs is a common project run by artist collective 9ème Concept, which was founded in 1990 by Ned, Jerk 45, and Stéphane Carricondo. 

There is also a state-of-the-art "Les Francs Colleurs“ augmented-reality application, which enables observers to use their smartphones to animate the motifs.

They spray graffiti on facades, paint stencils on walls, and paste huge wall surfaces all over with paper collages. Their art is rebellious, unsettling, pleasing, and popular.

Since around the turn of the millennium, a new art movement has formed worldwide and has become an indispensable part of the contemporary art world.

Jean-François Perroy alias Jef Aerosol is a protagonist of the original French Pochoir movement, which is massively quoted in the young Street Art of today. "Vite Fait, Bien Fait” is 1986 the first publication on this kind of art or rather, the culture of rebellion.

The adage "What you see is what you get" applies to Fairey, who is probably the most famous urban artist in the USA. His long-term commitment to unironic political posters is evidence of his belief in the truth and importance of his mission. Make art – not war!

An allusion to a body of matter or to a church celebration, we wonder? Éric Lacan remains true to himself with this captivating rendering of floral occultism.

His canvas is sewn to the frame with black thread, a technique that calls forth associations with sewn-up wounds.

Urban art and street art are rooted in the graffiti movement that emerged in the 1970s in New York and Philadelphia, which in turn originated in the American youth movements of the 1960s.

Whatbegan in the late 1960s with youths spraying signs onto buildings and subway cars in theNew York borough of the Bronx would go on to become a fervent artistic movement. 

"Armed" with spray cans, street gangs and individual writers would mark their territories with tags – signs left behind on public spaces.

David Walker's work focuses mostly on the female face. For a few years he worked only in black and white, but at some point rediscovered colors. Today, his images are bursting with every imaginable color. 

When he started, he copied pictures from magazines, today he photographs his models himself.

Gouzou, a little pictographic figure, is Jace's alter ego. This picture invokes the Lady Justice allegory. Two types of artists are being weighed. The illegal sprayer on the left, and on the right, the artist who produces work for the market.

Jace sees himself as caught between these two stools.

Because graffiti was often marketed together with hip-hop, not least for commercial reasons, it too experienced a seemingly unstoppable surge in the 1980s. The symbiosis of the two movements was more symbolic in nature, however.

The graffiti scene was a manifestation of hip-hop culture's rebelliousness, a movement that in its creativity, visual potency, and street credibility possessed a unique trait: it smelled of the streets.

For some, Okuda is the Michelangelo of the modern age. One of his works, an entire church nave, is worthy of the comparison. Okuda has produced countless murals but has also worked on sculptures and underground trains. His work on trains was contracted by the Kiev metro network

For a painter who works with three-dimensional structures – namely the urban architecture of modern cities – it is only logical to extend the image area into the surrounding space. Thomas Canto combines his panel paintings with leading lines and vanishing points rendered in nylon.

Eyes, phonetically coded as YZ, the emphasis is on seeing. In her current work, YZ focuses on strong women, amazons, female warriors. While her characters appear invincible, the material YZ portrays them on is highly fragile. She adds real pieces of metal as embellishments.

Sharks, SpongeBob, and the occasional white rabbit: these are the creatures on which Nychos performs his dissections. Nychos's vibrant Dance of the Death rendered in Las Vegas-like neon colors have garnered his one-of-a-kind status and a place among the upper echelons of Europea

Many of today's street art greats cite this "do-it-yourself" philosophy as a source of influence.

Its roots lie in the graffiti hype of 1970s New York, in the subcultural movement that, with its tags, pieces, getting-ups, styles, stencils, posters, and billboards, stimulated a creative re-setting of public spaces. The movement clearly hit a nerve elsewhere too.

With breathtaking speed, urban artists all over the world began covering their cities with their audacious pictorial concepts. 

Jef Aérosol uses the original quick of the French Pochoiriste genre. They create stenciled motifs, often combined with short slogans. Jef Aérosol does have a penchant for depicting cultural icons.

Through his piece "Basquiat" he pays homage to the renowned artist's importance as a role model.

The colorful mess is pervaded with urban art's key visual signal: the drip. Mambo has given the object a dramatic floating shadow and has constructed the entire work as a piece, the standard structure in pictorial graffiti.

Vermibus is an ad-dissolver. The artist uses a skeleton key to open the doors to the lightboxes at bus shelters and other privatized “public” spaces. He takes the posters to his studio and starts painting solvent onto them. The pigments dissolve.

Finally, the artist secretly hangs the posters back.

"Counting Fingers" moves along the border between dream and reality. Hypnagogic hallucinations of this intermediate world that played a prominent role in Dalí's work.

Fragments of reclining figures are shot through with abstract, dreamlike light to create an effect more associative than narrative.

Due to the global interconnectedness of contemporary UrbanArt, it has become almost impossible to find artists and styles that can be regarded as representatives of specific countries.

Today, there is perhaps only one region in the world where it is still possible to immediately identify where most of the street artists come from Latin America. This "continent's" UrbanArt draws heavily from its rich and historically unique cultural-visual heritage.

Gustavo and Otavio Pandolfo were born with their shared pseudonym: Os Gêmeos – the twins. Under this name, they took the graffiti and art worlds by storm as their distinctive style made them the most important and influential graffiti artists of their generation.

Cranio means "skull", but also "smart". He uses it to represent the fate of Brazil's indigenous peoples, who he portrays in blue. His images show them in comical situations, most of which involve confrontations with trash products from companies such as McDonald's or Red Bull.

Stinkfish's huge handstyle, for which he uses a roller technique, resembles grapixo, a Latin American graffiti style that combines calligraphic features with simple, stripped-back materials. Realistic stencil portraits form the basis of Stinkfish's colorful works.

Graffiti writing and the hip-hop movement arrived in Latin America at around the same time these phenomena hit the world's other continents: the 1980s. At first, graffiti held a fascinatingly exotic appeal.

Books, films, and magazines providing information about graffiti were harder to come by than in Europe. But the lack of knowledge was also a blessing: The first generations found their language faster than elsewhere.

Subtu's trademark is a monkey. The monkey's depiction here, with his fingers clasping the edges of the hole, is reminiscent of one icon of graffiti history:  "Kilroy was here", Kilroy being the obscure Second World War figure that was often found cheekily peering over imaginary walls.

Melim places his stencil images within fields on his canvas, superimposing a range of figures and text fragments in a manner reminiscent of printing techniques. He succeeds in achieving what is mistakenly said of many graffiti artists: it looks like a random piece of street.

Wandapot is known for his nostalgia-inspiring calligraphy and his murals created using decorative stencils evocative of Portuguese tiles. He connects the aforementioned elements with sketched portraits and comic book figures. Wandapot calls this combination style "punk surrealism".

Since 2011 – the year in which we put on the very first UrbanArt Biennale® at the VölklingerHütte World Heritage Site, running it simultaneously with the Art in the Streets UrbanArtexhibition held by the MOCA in Los Angeles – countless UrbanArt projects have sprung up all over the world.

However, today works of UrbanArt no longer comprise artist-inspired interventions in the urban sphere, but more often are initiated by municipal strategists who want to revitalize city neighborhoods.

Huge animals, graphic figurative work, abstract scenarios with a surreal flavor: Agostino Lacuri can meet many of the expectations associated with urban art. However, the artist truly comes into his own when focusing on a rather different subject: vases, potted plants, and the like.

FAITH XLVII is best known for her monumental facade murals. But FAITH XLVII's latest direction seems to question, or at least put into perspective, this tradition. Her use of coffee grounds, ink, and yarn on paper in her "Chaos Theory I-VI" series is highly unusual in the genre.

In his series "All Chicken Are Beautiful", Won ABC, aka Markus Müller, returns to the extreme social critique of his early days, a critique situated somewhere between kitsch and cataclysm. ACAB – an art hooligan best described as a "color kamikaze".

Kera from Berlin covers facades of buildings, canvases, and paper with his fragmented mosaics and their intricate geometry. The facade designs evoke constructivism, on the one hand, and post-war abstraction and art in public spaces, such as church windows, on the other.

The social room in the sinter plant was the washroom of the "Filler". “Fillers” are workers who loaded ores, sinter, and lime stored at the Burden Hall into the overhead trolley car for the filling of the blast furnaces.

They worked around the clock, at any time of the day or season. The filling of the hanging trolley cars in the cold, draughty and loud Burden Hall was not only physically demanding but  also a danger for health due to dust and dirt.

With the emergence of "Banksy", the concept of street art was both reinvented and brought to collapse. Like sweet poison served by a person(a) we know, or like a(n)(un)holy war with our assumptions in the crosshairs. "Banksy" is also a veritable media masterpiece. The greatest t

Blek le Rat is the inventor of modern stencil graffiti. He occasionally works with images from art history, which he likes to give a modern, somewhat shocking twist. The faux wood fence together with the minimalist stencil enables him to evoke the rebellious graffiti of his wild days.

Seiler's approach involves inserting reduced geometric forms into outdoor spaces. Some of Seiler's stripes are horizontal or diagonal, while others are curved, jagged, or even blurred.

Most notable is the manner in which Seiler's "PublicAdCampaign" has created an additional virtual plane for our times.