Stairways, bridges, fences and passages, with a wide sky above, and again and again a view into a dark forest: the paintings of Hendrik “ecb” Beikirch show the places where graffiti is created, and the paths that lead there. In them, one finds oneself in a melancholic vision of the urban underground, which is becoming ever rarer.
The Street as Subject
The Kassel-born artist has been a well-known name in the graffiti and street art scene since the mid-1990s. Unlike the familiar transfers of street signs and symbols into the gallery, ecb does not try to declare the white cube a street. Instead, he shows works on canvas that portray the street itself: the home of the graffiti painter. With photographic precision, he sprays dark stairways, bridges and fences. Alongside them are views into the forest: dark silhouettes of trees against a pale sky, trunks fading into mist and twilight. They show the edges of the city, those quiet places one passes through on nocturnal journeys.
Graffiti as an Art of Space
Graffiti as an aesthetic somewhere between art and property damage, as the sign language of speed used by mobile urban nomads: such characterisations of spray-painted murals have long been commonplace. With his canvases, however, ecb is not so much taking the path from the underground into the respectability of galleries. Rather, he shows that graffiti is essentially an art of space and its staging. He therefore does not transfer the sign language of walls onto canvas, but the topographical settings in which it takes place. Above his stairways, bridges and passages, a wide sky often stretches out, an anarchic sign of the open space for which graffiti is actually intended.
Fleeting Beauty
In these visions, the anonymity and secrecy of the practice turn into near-photographic perfection. The deliberately reduced palette, the blurs and the liquefactions radiate the melancholy of a bygone era, like images from the early days of photography. Here, graffiti has congealed into an art of fleeting beauty.
About the Artist
Hendrik Beikirch was born in Kassel in 1974. In the late 1980s, he picked up a spray can for the first time and left his mark on trains. He later studied art education in Koblenz, where he now lives and works. Einen Sommer (One Summer) is his first solo exhibition at Pretty Portal.
“Einen Sommer”
ecb · Hendrik Beikirch
Opening
Friday, 8 May 2009, from 7 pm
Exhibition
8 May – 5 June 2009
Pretty Portal
Brunnenstraße 12
40223 Düsseldorf
Note (2026): A year later, ecb showed his portraits at Pretty Portal for the first time in Faces of Hope and Struggle. It is for these portraits that he has since become internationally renowned. In 2012, he painted a mural around 70 metres high in Busan, South Korea, at the time the tallest in Asia.
