Graffiti Berlin: Street Art & Urban Walls

When it comes to graffiti in Berlin, the 1UP crew reigns supreme. This prolific group from Kreuzberg has not only made their mark across the city with their daring rooftop rollers and train bombings, but they’ve also taken their art global. In addition to releasing their own documentary, “1UP Graffiti – One United Power”, showcasing their work in Berlin and around the world, the crew has also established a strong online presence with their dedicated YouTube channel, “1UP Graffiti TV.” ...

Artbase is back - The urban art festival, which took place in the abandoned sanitarium Grabowsee near Berlin in 2011, is now heading to the abandoned NSA fieldstation at Teufelsberg Berlin! With about 100 confirmed urban artists, including Karl Addison and James Bullough, Alias, Buff Diss, Graffiti Research Lab Germany, SAM Crew, Mean Marek, SP-38, Tona and Wurstbande, Artbase 2012 is with no doubt going to become this year’s biggest urban art festival in Berlin… Artbase 2012 is not a commercial festival, but an urban art weekend. We like free spirits and promote fine arts. The festival combines urban art, royalty-free music on different dance-floors and workshops with the magical feeling that radiates from this place. (loosely translated) ...

Is urban art influencing urban development and planning? How does creative street culture cause social restructuring? And does graffiti equal gentrification? With its new monthly Culture Talk series, the network for cultural development Platoon is going to discuss those and similar questions! Furthermore, the NGO for culture, art and communication is going to open the doors of its new headquarter in Berlin for the first time… Urban Art vs. Gentrification? The discussion about street art and graffiti triggering first beginnings of a gentrification process is not new, at least in Berlin. Nonetheless, almost everyone in town, being threatened by gentrificational impacts has a different opinion and blames someone else. Platoon is now going to bring together artists, scientists and scene players, who all are probably part of the extensive social, economical and cultural shiftings taking place here and elsewhere… ...

New York-based artist Carlos Mare, aka Mare139, is going to open his first solo-show in Berlin tomorrow! Entitled Physical Graffiti, the show will not present his crazy 3D metal wildstyle graffiti, but his latest paintings and drawings focusing on the art of the B-boy dance… *Mare began his creative career during the formative era of NYC subway painting between 1975-1985, appearing in the original cult classic documentary Style Wars in 1982. Growing up against the landscape of hip-hop in its evolution, he charted a new discourse about the role and aesthetic of the art form as sculpture in the public space, beginning with letter-based works and progressing to a more modernist interpretation of the graffiti form. Internationally exhibited and collected, his sculptural works are among the most innovative of the post NYC subway graffiti movement. ...

Last Saturday, famed Swedish graffiti performance artist Magnus Gustafsson aka Nug opened his Human Behaviour exhibition at Skalitzers Gallery in Berlin! Showing some crazy artworks of his Fine Lines series, Nug’s was it to explore the role of tagging within contemporary art… …and again he used a slightly different way in communicating his opinion and impression: Entering the exhibition’s second show room, visitors came in touch with kind of a nice tags in a mirror installation. Presenting two spray-painted lines (one painted with a cheap, one with an expensive can), following no recognizable patterns, the mirrors invited every viewer to play around, creating different impressions by changing angles and distances and combining lines on different mirrors virtually to an entire new image. ...

Infamous Swedish artist Nug is going to open his solo tagging exhibition Human Behaviour at Skalitzers Gallery in Berlin this Saturday! Nug, whose latest project (the concept is fuck you, yes you) for the Fame Festival 2011 in Italy got loads of publicity around the globe, has gained wide recognition in recent years for his graffiti-inspired actions! In Berlin, NUG is going to show the fourth exposition in the Fine Lines series, exploring the role of tagging within contemporary art… ...

As you already know, Washington D.C. native urban artist James Bullough is currently creating two huge, photo-realistic murals in Berlin - here comes the corresponding painting action photo-series! Located near Berlin’s Rosenthaler Platz, the upcoming contemporary art space Torstrasse 111 / Co Verlag provides enough space for the two striking giants James is painting for several days now using all his photo-realistic graffiti skills to finish up with both murals, before the new art space opens the first time at the end of April. ...

To entitle them On the shoulders of giants is probably the best way to describe these huge murals by American urban artist James Bullough coming up at Torstrasse 111 in Berlin… James Bullough, who grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC, began sketching and eventually devouring anything he could find with even a hint of graffiti inspirited imagery on it in his early teens and developed in that way the required skills for photo-realistic graffiti works. Right now, he is painting two impressive giants into one of the arising new art spaces at Torstrasse 111, a contemporary location for art, and invited me to join him. ...

For month now, the boys and girls of Cave Berlin are hardworking to make it possible to open the new, but still secret gallery space near Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin for the public. Now I heard that it’s probably April 27th, when Cave is going to open their three art spaces to the public, showing five artists and their works… But until then, there’s still lots of work to be done, as James Bullough and Addison Karl (JBAK) just showed when they painted this new collaboration mural in the Cave’s backyard, combining their contrasting styles into a mashup of antonyms: realism vs. illustrative, expressive vs. precise, hard vs. soft, black vs. a spectrum… ...

You can see a lot of train graffiti in Berlin and I already saw the weirdest things like semi-automated train graffiti devices, other stuff and of course I know fire extinguisher graffiti and ink tank paintings, but I’ve never heard about people using fire extinguishers to paint their trains - until yesterday… High Speed Train Graffiti On my regular way through Berlin I had to wait at Ostkreuz for my train and was pleasantly surprised when that blue dripping babe entered the station. In my eyes this is definitely the next step of train graffiti, taking the fire extinguisher technique to another level! And it perfectly shows what more anti-graffiti cops and criminalization carry through: ...