Chicken Run Collage

I started painting Graffiti at the age of 12. At that time Graffiti was far away from any acceptance as an art form and was widely considered as being merely a contemporary youth movement and the means for expresing political opinion. Until I had been able to study finearts at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and the UCLM Cuenca all I knew about graffiti and painting was self taught. During my studies I refined my knowledge of past painting styles and am regarding Graffiti as a logic successor to the predescending art forms. Graffiti for me is non political - it can, but it does not have to convey an explicit message. In my work I consider Graffiti as purely a language of forms, as the underlying speech system of my painting´s language. A Letter, from which early Graffiti in its purest form derives, could be regarded as a symbol for a representation in the real world - and therefore it could be regarded as figurative (as well as a painting is, like René Magritte demonstrated in "Ceci n´est pas une pipe"). By abstracting the Graffiti Form I am creating the Abstraction of the Abstract, Abstract Graffiti, a purely abstract form, a second level abstraction which with its intricate shapes is my form of 21st century abstraction. Another big topic in my work is Portrait. In a world with towns like concrete jungles, walls are the suitable background for contemporary painting. I am steadily finding new ways to express incoming inspiration mostly in the form of paintings, but as well in installations and sculptures of various materials. My main source of inspiration is nature in contrast to the human being lost in the big concrete city labyrinths searching in science and spirituality for a reason of existence. See more of my artowrk on my homepage www.ZOLART.de