Graffiti covers the city with layered messages. It settles on walls and is pasted over, smudged, added to or painted over. Like sediments of time, these layers speak of voices that want to be heard: sometimes loud and direct, sometimes hidden beneath new layers.
Structure and Layers
The city becomes a canvas of countless textures: concrete, metal, weathered paint. Electrical and utility boxes become carriers of spontaneous messages, a means of exchanging information that reveals itself in passing. Where official infrastructure and informal expression overlap, a new, polyphonic texture emerges.
In Passing
Anyone walking attentively through the streets will discover these layers: peeling stickers, lettering shimmering through, traces of past interventions. The exhibition STROM 2 makes these fleeting moments visible and shows how urban textures are constantly renegotiated through graffiti. Oliver Räke conceives of the exhibition as a field of play, a resonating space, a living structure in flux. On show are collages, paintings and unique screen prints.
The Artist
Under the pseudonym MAGIC, Oliver Räke left his first marks on Düsseldorf's urban space in the early 1980s. He soon connected with other pioneers of the scene such as Loomit and How & Nosm. Together with them, he shaped the graffiti landscape in Germany and its neighbouring countries throughout the 1980s and 90s. Since then, he has been exploring the intersection between the urban environment and the white cube. Regarded as a legend of the international graffiti scene, Oliver Räke today combines tagging with ideas from modern graphic design and concepts of contemporary art. He is considered one of the early exponents of post-graffiti.
Oliver "MAGIC" Räke – STROM 2
Exhibition
14 March – 11 April 2025
Opening
Friday, 14 March 2025, 7 pm
Pretty Portal
Brunnenstraße 12
40223 Düsseldorf
