llya Lipkin’s Untitled (2017), a print of graffiti over a shop decal.

Graffiti at Museion, Bolzano can make the surprising claim to be the first institutional exhibition in Italy to focus on the relationship between contemporary art and the public drawings that have come to define urban spaces. The show focuses on how the visual vernacular of the street has entered the studio, arguing – clearly, and with precision – that graffiti is the result of a profoundly specific way of seeing and experiencing urban landscapes.

The history of graffiti as a form is often most visible in footage or fictions set in 1980s New York, in which young artists rode freestyle on trains into the bowels of the city, leaving their tags and spray-painted art on the walls of subway carriages. These were temporary and moving sites, which evoke the erasure and repetition of conceptual artists at the time. Alongside this efflorescence in urban art, the 1980s move to canvas was a way to preserve and monetise: a method of survival.

Graffiti takes, as its starting point, the patent of a spray paint manufactured in 1951. From there, it studiously refuses to position graffiti or spray paint artists as “outsider,” instead telling a story of inclusion, conversation and exchange. Beginning with spray paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, the exhibition unfolds through the golden age of the 1980s to contemporary artists who implement graffiti into their diverse practices. The current engagement with graffiti as readymade, action and artistic tool is excellently drawn out by curator Leonie Radine and US artist Ned Vena.

R.I.P. Germain, Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars (RA(C↔G)E) (2024). Photo by Christabel Stewart.

Art history tends to pictorially envisage the relationship of the living with the dead and what’s passed – putting a marker in place to honour a geography, an action, a person, a movement or a feeling. It is also a way of making something moving into something still – so bringing graffiti into the museum might feel like the art form’s death knell. But somehow, the pictorial form of this writing, constantly overwritten and erased, fits within the contemporary canon.

So long have graffiti artists been sidelined as a part of societal vandalism that this exhibition achieves a respectful position, at last, recognising that artists and graffiti-makers are co-curious about writing straight onto the wall of societal fabric. It is not sponsored by a streetwear brand; nor does it proclaim, “Graffiti is rebellion – seize your spray cans”. Rather, its findings are sensitive and multiple: René Daniëls was afraid of it, while Michael Krebber understood that, in his arch dialogue with painting, a single line of spray paint (an exclusion, an absence, a white line) stood for so much.

Lines of a different kind are found in RIP Germain’s Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars (RA(C<->G)E) (2024), which continues the artist’s interest in “false fronts” – shops that hide their activities behind a facade, their true nature only revealed by graffiti tags. The title references an album by American hip-hop group Killarmy, itself named after a document from the 1980s that purports to be a plan to control the masses, supposedly discovered in an abandoned government photocopier. Germain has created a free-standing shopfront, shutters down, with graffiti covering its face; behind, a little dish of cocaine sits beside a vase of flowers.

Hidden information, glimpsed at, is graffiti’s promise. The opening of the show was preceded by a showing of Chantal Akerman’s incredible film News from Home (1976), a slow and scenic tale of New York soundtracked by a voiceover of a series of letters received by Ackerman from her mother. The graffiti covering every inch of this harsh and rugged city appears as a leitmotif at odds with the intimacy of the spoken words. In the heady scenery of Bolzano, in the foothills of the Dolomites, a similar juxtaposition emerges, the push and pull of graffiti’s intimacies and confrontations.

Graffiti captures both the poetic pause and the visual energy of a form of the written word that is activated before, during, and after itself. It presents a chance to meet at a respectful interchange of contemplative but radical visual communication and codes. From a height, we see streets, walls, trains and views of the hidden, the erased and the consumed. Graffiti, as a practice, both provokes and distances – but also allows for intimacies and shared understandings to emerge. .