Art in a Conflicted World

The outdoors has become a school, the urban underground a studio, and unbounded anti-authoritarianism has replaced the influence of the academy and the market. Art movements and Hidden Masters have emerged here and are now also gaining institutional visibility. Some come from a graffiti background, others studied painting, while some were once urban trespassers who painted in places where they had to flee the authorities. The art that has grown out of these contexts can best be described in three terms: abstraction, autonomy and—depending on one’s perspective—post-vandalism.

The recently concluded exhibition Under the Milky Way at Kunstverein Hannover presented compelling positions from these scenes across Europe. It was not a graffiti show, but presented an artistic transfer that brought abstract painting and other practices into the museum space. It encompassed raw ideas, irony, autonomous art, and conceptual and anarchic approaches. Sometimes unsolicited, an art of art emerges—at times shaped by political positions, at others by the freedom to do precisely what one wants to do.

The book accompanying the exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover brings together key protagonists of this development in a constellation never seen before. They come from heterogeneous urban and artistic scenes, yet repeatedly find themselves under the Milky Way: with a growing itch in their fingers, calling for a freedom of action that seems scarcely possible in daylight.

Artists: Amos Angeles, Alexandre Bavard, Cäcilia Brown, Stephen Burke, Bus 126, Brad Downey and Akim, Antwan Horfee, Hams Klemens, Klub7, Daniel Laufer, Mischa Leinkauf, Martina Morger, Moses und Taps, Martina Morger, Christoph und Sebastian Mügge, Patrick Niemann, Rocco und seine Brüder, Veli Silver, Mathias Weinfurter, Angst Yok