Abstract Graffiti Wallpaper

What is abstract graffiti wallpaper?

Abstract graffiti wallpaper borrows the visual language of street art (tags, signs, symbols and fast, gestural strokes) and arranges it as a composition for an interior wall. Instead of legible words or a single image, it works with marks: lines, circles, arrows and brushstrokes that the eye reads as writing even when they spell nothing.The route from street wall to gallery wall is well documented. In the late 1970s, a young Jean-Michel Basquiat wrote graffiti across Manhattan under the name SAMO, together with his friend Al Diaz. As the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen notes, he went from being a central figure of New York’s graffiti scene to causing a sensation in the art world.

Abstract Graffiti Wallpaper by Vesper Royale carries that energy indoors: sweeping crimson brushstrokes and black hand-drawn signs on a warm, weathered cream ground, composed as one continuous wall.

Why are signs and symbols so important in Basquiat’s work?

Basquiat, who lived from 1960 to 1988 and was self-taught according to the Museum of Modern Art, built his paintings from words, scribbles, diagrams and recurring symbols. Already in his SAMO period he paired the tag with a crown and a copyright sign. The crown became his best-known motif: in Kings of Egypt II (1982), held by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, it sits above two skulls. The Studio Museum in Harlem describes the crown as a symbol of power, which Basquiat used both to honour the figures he painted and to comment on power itself. In his work, a sign is rarely decoration. It is a statement compressed into a few lines.

Abstract Graffiti Wallpaper works in the same register of marks and signs: dotted circles, triangles, a house drawn in a single line, rows of points along the base. None of them explains itself. That is the point.

How did Banksy bring street art into the museum?

Banksy, the anonymous artist from Bristol, became internationally known for satirical, anti-establishment work made on city walls. In 2009 his home city’s museum hosted Banksy versus Bristol Museum, an exhibition in which his works were placed among the museum’s own collections. According to Visit Bristol, one piece from the show, the Paint-Pot Angel, can still be seen inside Bristol Museum and Art Gallery today. The exhibition captured a wider shift: art made illegally on the street was now being shown, queued for and kept by public institutions.

Abstract Graffiti Wallpaper brings that tension between street and gallery into a room of your own, without a single can of spray paint.

Can an abstract graffiti mural work in a home or restaurant?

Large-scale graffiti-inspired murals work best where they can be seen whole and from a distance: restaurants and bars, double-height dining rooms, long hallways, the wall behind a sofa. A limited palette, such as red, black and cream, keeps a busy composition legible, and warm, natural materials like leather, wood and stone soften its edge. Because the pattern does not repeat, the mural reads as a single artwork rather than as wallpaper, which suits rooms that already have strong architecture or high ceilings.

Abstract Graffiti Wallpaper is designed as a single feature wall with no repeat and printed to your exact wall size. Put it where people stop and look: above a banquette, behind a bar, at the end of a corridor.