“Legendary Lines” is part of a program that Galerie Danysz is devoting to urban art this year, with several successive perspectives on the movement. It does not retrace its history: it opens with the figures of the 1980s and places them in dialogue with more contemporary artists.
What unites them is the line. Before walls, formats and names, urban art was built on a gesture: a line recognizable at a glance, one that repeats and is passed on. This is the thread the exhibition chooses to follow.
The title plays on the many meanings of the word “lines.” First, the plastic line: the stroke that makes each artist identifiable. The line as course: a practice sustained over time, sometimes against the grain. The line as movement: the one these artists drew one after another, until urban art found its place in the artistic landscape. And, more lightly, the subway lines that structure the city and our journeys, and on which many of them began to paint.
At the origin of this line, in the 1970s and 1980s, stand four figures of New York graffiti: Aone, Futura, Rammellzee and Dondi White. Pioneers, they invented a graphic language of rare density, in which the letter becomes form, architecture, at times cosmology. Their writing is deep and instantly recognizable: you know a hand before you read a name. They are legends in the strongest sense of the word, those who set the codes that everyone else would later inherit, divert or surpass.
In their wake, from the 1990s onward, Invader, Barry McGee, Maya Hayuk and, more recently, Felipe Pantone have renewed the practice, each pushing its limits. Invader has turned the city into a planetary playground, where pixel mosaics appear around any street corner. Barry McGee has made the line a gesture both nervous and melancholic, between battered figures and repeated motifs. Maya Hayuk has shifted the stroke toward color and rhythm, with vibrant compositions that spill beyond the wall. Each has become a figure in their own right on the contemporary scene, without ever giving up what makes them singular.
Finally, Miss Tic and Swoon open the line to dialogue. In their work, the line becomes testimony and commitment: it carries voices, stories, struggles. Between the stencil of one and the cut paper of the other, there is another way of holding the line, one that looks at the city and those who live in it.
From Dondi White to Swoon, “Legendary Lines” thus composes a journey in which each artist extends, shifts or takes up anew the same thread: that of a stroke that, from one generation to the next, never stops being passed on.