Inside Outside, 2019

MadC   Emerging artists

Claudia Walde alias MadC was born in 1980 in Bautzen GDR (East Germany). MadC is an internationally renowned artist from Germany, who has worked in over 35 different counties across the globe.

MadC started her artistic trajectory as a teenaged graffiti writer, and has since then developed her creative endeavors into various fields such as graphic design, writing and fine art. She has studied at both Burg Giebichenstein – University of Art and Design, Halle and Central Saint Martins College, London, and carries a master degree in graphic design. MadC is also author and designer of two books on street and graffiti art Sticker City - Paper Graffiti Art (2007) and Street Fonts - Graffiti Alphabets From Around The World (2011) (both published under her birth name).

As MadC, she did her first graffiti piece already in 1996, and became known in the early 00's for her burner walls, with dynamic wildstyle-pieces placed in detailed sceneries, often with themes and motifs taken from fantasy and sci-fi such as dragons and dinosaurs. Already these early works revealed a passion for meticulous accuracy. Her major international break trough came however in 2010 with the production of the work that has become known as the “700-Wall" - a 700 square-meter work along the train line between Berlin and Halle. This painting is most likely the largest graffiti mural created by a single person, and it was finished in four months time.

After the 700-Wall MadC has produced a few more thematic storytelling murals with detailed sceneries, but has also started to change direction in her artistic path. Since 2009 she has thus expanded her artistic outlet from graphic design and public murals into the format of canvases and fine art exhibitions. And in both her canvases and more recent murals the representational and narrative structures have begun to give way to more abstract painting, to images where the fore- and background have been flattened out and forged together with the middle ground as if the painting was painted on superimposed layers of thin glass.

The result may at first glance appear as a return to a more traditional wildstyle-graffiti, but appears on closer consideration rather as a step further away from her early work. The artistic strategy could perhaps best be described as an attempt to capture the energy of traditional graffiti, rather than its formal characteristic, by using the strong colors and dynamic lines from wildstyle graffiti's letters, its arrows and bars, but abandon the outline and clearly defined areas next to each other for a layering of shapes - and thus creating an perception of transparent and liquid forms.