Street Art and Graffiti - From Urban Rebellion to Global Artistic Expression

Graffiti in the form we know today has a relatively recent history , managing to reach almost all corners of the planet. The name graffiti is derived from the Italian word sgraffo , which means scratch. Scratches on walls can be found since the beginning, when man scratched on cave walls, then in Ancient Greece there were scratches on clay pots, and in Pompeii even electoral scratches and drawings on walls were discovered.

In 1904, the first magazine to deal with graffiti in toilets was launched: Anthropophyteia . Later, during World War II, the Nazis wrote on walls to fuel their propaganda machine, and graffiti was also important for resistance movements as a means of making their protests public. During the student uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s, protesters made their views public through posters and painted words.

Modern graffiti developed in the late 1970s in New York and Philadelphia , where artists such as Taki 183 , Julio 204, Cat 161 , and Cornbread painted their names on walls or in subway stations around Manhattan .

Graffiti in a subway station in the 70s

It seems that New York 's mix of cultures, from the slums of Harlem to the glitz of Broadway , was fertile ground for graffiti artists. Cornbread, for example, became famous when he painted his tag (a graffiti artist's signature ) on an elephant at the zoo.

The Elephant with Cornbread Graffiti

At first, artists used their real names or nicknames, but soon the first pseudonyms began to appear. Over time, graffiti artists began to look for other ways to promote their art, so the tags got bigger and bigger, until they appeared on the first trains in New York .

Graffiti on trains

In the early 1980s, the graffiti phenomenon began to appear in European cities, especially in Amsterdam and Madrid , where it had its roots in the punk phenomenon, and with the advent of hip-hop, the European graffiti scene was launched. Later, graffiti art spread to Asia and South America , reaching high standards.

If at first the New York style was centered on the deformation of letters, there were several styles such as: the legible blockletter , the deformed and contorted wildstyle , the well-known bubble style and 3D .

Graffiti letters characters

Spray paint is the traditional tool of graffiti, but nowadays the range of materials has expanded considerably – from acrylic paint, to airbrush, wax crayon, posters, stickers, and then we have the stencil technique , which is the technique of using a template.

Stencil technique

Today, graffiti groups have emerged, ranging from comical figures to photorealism. Logos and iconic graffiti specialize in visually striking emblems and figures to match. Today's graffiti artists prefer to distance themselves from the word, either because it is no longer contemporary or because it evokes images of vandalism and damage. They prefer to label their work as spray art , post-graffiti , neo-graffiti , or street art .