Complex Geometric Graffiti

Emerging in the late  1960s, Graffiti was born out of the blank concrete walls of Philadelphia and New York. Those who tagged with their mobile and easily obtained medium of the spray can followed in the footsteps of the movement’s pioneers to densely fill the walls of cities and grabbed their own small share of glory. By the 1980s a variety of graffiti styles began to appear in street art, including Tracy 163’s “wild-style” and later, of course, the geometric patterns of work by Keith Haring. It can be argued that geometric art simplifies the view, since its own origins in the 1920s. But that is where the complexity lies, using either simple or intricate patterns to create a completely new viewing experience. Now change the type of canvas and take work that creates a relationship between negative space and form, and transplant it onto the concrete walls of the cityscape or the back of a skateboard. The ability to affront and then direct the viewer’s eye through geometric patterns is indeed utterly complex. In Artsper’s own collections, artists like Medra and Nadel have managed to take this abstract artistic ability, with Nadel using paint and acrylic markers to play with superposition and repetition, intermixing graffiti and abstract expressionism.