Reverse Graffiti - Top Artists

Do you know reverse graffiti? Imagine you sit in a car an the windows are so dirty, that you can draw little figures, slogans or tags onto it with your fingers - that’s reverse graffiti! It is the art to make detailed, stencil art alike images out of dirt.

“Do not spray, but cleaning” is the motto! This is why the reverse graffiti artists use soap, high pressure cleaners and water instead of brushes and cloths.

Although it is not really new, the reverse graffiti it is a specialization that has aroused international interest for some time. Whether soundproof walls, roads or buildings everywhere are object, which are permanently exposed to dirty, clean with the help of stencils and water so that there come up real artworks!

To give you an impression, what these artists are able to do, we present you the top three reverse graffiti artists!

Moose The most well-known cleaning graffiti artists is the Briton Paul Curtis aka Moose. He is regarded as the inventor of the reverse graffiti and designs for over ten years, the roads in this manner. Over time he has cooperated with some marketing companies, which wanted to accompany their advertising campaigns with the help of this innovative art form.

Alexandre Orion Another great representative of his discipline is the Brazilian Alexandre Orion. He wants to show directly the significant effects of pollution with his reverse graffiti. So he created, for example in 2007, a giant mural artwork inside a car tunnel in Sao Paulo, which shows a huge count of skulls.This persuades the leaders of the Brazilian metropolis to clean almost every other tunnel in the city!

Scott Wades The Texan Scott Wades is the third and last artist we want to show you. He has focused on dirty cars and conjures on their dusty glass amazing paintings. With brush and pen he removes the dust so fine, that even the smallest details become visible.

Of course there are many other artists and non-artists who make use of reverse graffiti techniques - For example French graffiti artist ZEVS, who cleaned the slogan “Ich darf die Mauern meiner Stadt nicht beschmutzen” (“I shall not dirty the walls of my city”) with a high-pressure cleaner onto a wall at the Outsides exhibition 2007 in Wuppertal, Germany.

But also the (advertising) industry has several times served the innovativeness of the legal ambiguity of the new graffiti trend. A relatively new example of commercial use of reverse graffiti is the campaign “Fight Carbon” by IT giant IBM.