Anyone who walks into STRAAT for the ESSENCE steps into an industrial warehouse where the origins of graffiti are figured out. The hall comes from the days when ships were built here. Now there are works hanging and standing there that do not so much tell stories in images, but mainly show how letters, names and signatures relate to each other.
The ESSENCE is conceived as a deepening of the basics of graffiti writing. The exhibition revolves around names, tags, stripes, lines, shapes, flow and rhythm. You see how writers endlessly repeat, vary and style their names. The repetition is not an afterthought: it is precisely that repetition that shows how a style emerges and sharpens itself.
Instead of large figurative murals, STRAAT here emphasizes the grammar of graffiti. The way a line is set, how a letter is stretched or shortened, how a tag appears on a surface in one motion: the ESSENCE treats those choices as building blocks of a visual system. Thus it becomes clear that an apparently quickly scrawled tag is based on fixed principles of rhythm and form.
Instead of large figurative murals, STRAAT here emphasizes the grammar of graffiti.
With this exhibition, STRAAT reinforces the role of the NDSM wharf as a cultural center of gravity in North. By analyzing the fundamental elements of graffiti within a large museum context, practice on the street and research in the hall are brought closer together. the ESSENCE thus gives language to something that passes by on walls every day, but is rarely unraveled so systematically.
Amsterdam Now Museums