Né dans la rue - Landmark Graffiti Expo at Fondation Cartier

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents "Né dans la rue", on view from July 7 to November 29, 2024. 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.

This 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.

The exhibition traces the origins of the graffiti movement while offering a panorama of the diversity of contemporary writing. It 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.

In collaboration with the Association le M.U.R., the Fondation Cartier has also invited artists to create large-scale posters, in the presence of the public, every first weekend of the month. These posters are exhibited at the Fondation Cartier for one month before being moved to the billboard of the association, located at the intersection of the Saint-Maur and Oberkampf streets in Paris.

The artists participating in the project include Alexöne, the collectif 1980, Fancie, Jean Faucheur and WK Interact, Honet, NP77, Poch, RCF1, Sun7, and Tom Tom.

In addition, L’Atlas, DTagno and Yseult have been invited to create unique and temporary works for the garden of the Fondation Cartier. 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. In addition Agnès Varda’s film Murs Murs, screened twice a week,
provides the opportunity to discover the muralists of Los Angeles at the beginning of the 1980s. From São Paulo to Amsterdam, San Francisco to Paris, graffiti today continues to evolve, adopting new forms and modes of expression.

Now through November 29th, 2024

Open every day, except Monday, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Open Tuesday evenings until 10 p.m.

Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
261, boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris

Comments

[Simon]

frankly, I find graffiti utter rubbish. its in keeping with the "dumbing down" of society