From May 8th, Pretty Portal will be showing an exhibition by ecb - Hendrik Beikirch titled: "Einen Sommer" (One Summer). The artist, who hails from Kassel, has been a fixture in the graffiti and street art scene since the mid-nineties. Unlike other known transfers of street signs into the seriousness of galleries, Hendrik Beikirch does not try to declare the white cube a street, but rather shows works on canvas that portray the street. The home of the graffiti artist. If one looks at his dark, spray-painted stairs, bridges and fences, executed with photographic precision, one finds oneself in a melancholic vision of the urban underground, which is becoming increasingly rare. Einen Sommer ecb - Hendrik Beikirch Exhibition: May 8th - June 5th, 2009 Vernissage: May 8th from 7 pm with DJ Lee Bass
as part of the Night of the Museums: May 9th from 7 pm with DJ Nico Mizou + Graffiti short films in the shop window
Graffiti as an aesthetic between art and damage; the sign language of the speed of mobile urban Indians – such characterizations of spray-painted murals have long been common. With his works on canvas, Hendrik “ecb“ Beikirch now takes less the path from the underground to the seriousness of galleries, but rather shows that graffiti is essentially an art of space and its staging. In this respect, he does not transfer the sign language applied to walls and fences to the canvas, but rather those topographical scenarios in which it takes place.Stairs, bridges and passages are the subjects of his canvas works, over which a wide sky often stretches as an anarchic sign of the open space for which graffiti art is actually intended. Anonymity and secrecy of the practice transform in these visual visions into almost photographic perfection, whose consciously reduced color palette, blurring and liquefaction radiate the melancholy of a bygone era, as revealed in the contemplation of early photographs. Here, graffiti has solidified into an art of fleeting beauty.