A woman looks at graffiti presented during an exhibition titled “T.A.G” at the Grand Palais in Paris

Toxic, Seen, Quik and Rammellzee: the mythical heroes of New York’s 1970s subway system graffiti scene hit Paris this week for the biggest outing to date of aerosol art from around the planet.

A teenage fad born in New York’s ghettos and working-class streets, graffiti began to filter into art galleries and museums in the 80s. Since then, Quik along with other urban art icons such as Koor and Toxic, have become established artists, and graffiti is now even sold at auction.

“Graffiti is a fleeting form of art,” said Alain-Dominique Gallizia, the French architect who commissioned the works on show after encountering graffiti by today’s urban artists on his building sites.

Gallizia, known by the artists under his initials ADG, contacted the pioneers of graffiti along with their contemporaries and asked them to produce works for an exhibition, offering a workshop outside Paris where he now has a collection of 300.

“I was seduced by this art,” he told AFP. “It was not right for it to disappear.”

Signed Ghost, Blade, and Psyckoze, names invented for scrawling over trains and tunnels and walls, the works are largely from the US and France, but also include graffiti from Australia, Brazil, Chile and Japan.

“I’ve been doing this for 35 years now,” said first-generation New York graffiti artist Seen, an Italian-American born in 1961, real name Richard Mirando.

“I started off as an 11-year-old scribbling on school doors and the next thing I was painting subway cars,” he told AFP. “At first it was fun and then it became an addiction.”

Thinker Rammellzee went on to theorize his work as “Gothic futurism,” a battle between letters and their warfare against alphabet standardization.

All of them kicked off their careers in their teens. “In graffiti you write your own history,” said Toxic, now 44.

“I was black, I was poor, I lived in the Bronx. I found a name, a style and I started to write my own life,” he said.

Some of the spraycan stars now are in museums. “It is now agreed that the graffiti movement is an artistic movement,” said Nailia Nourkhaeva, who runs the Onega gallery in Paris that specializes in street art.

“Graffiti is evolving,” said Gallizia. “It’s just like classical art, there are genres, masters, schools, such as ‘wild style’ or ‘bubble.’”

At auction, works by the New York pioneers can fetch up to 50,000 euros (US$66,450) and more contemporary graffiti between 15,000 and 20,000 euros.

Source: AFP