"Legendary Lines" is part of a program that Galerie Danysz is devoting to urban art this year, offering several successive perspectives on the movement. It does not set out to retrace its history: it opens with the figures of the 1980s and places them in dialogue with more contemporary artists.
What brings them together is the line. Before walls, formats and names, urban art was built on a gesture: a line recognizable at a glance, repeated, and passed on. This is the thread the exhibition chooses to follow.
The title plays on the several meanings of the word "lines." The line as a plastic element, first: the mark that makes each artist identifiable. The line as a course of action: a practice sustained over time, sometimes against the grain. The line that creates a movement: the one these artists drew one after another, until urban art took its place in the artistic landscape. And, more lightly, metro lines, which structure the city and our journeys, and on which many of them began to paint.
The exhibition presents works by major artists of the movement, such as Dondi White and Futura. They are in dialogue with works by Miss Tic, a pioneer of stencil art in France, whose texts and female figures blend poetry, humor and a critical eye, and by Swoon, who creates portraits and installations from cut paper and printmaking.