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<\/a> notes, he went from being a central figure of New York’s graffiti scene to causing a sensation in the art world.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Basquiat, who lived from 1960 to 1988 and was self-taught according to the Museum of Modern Art<\/a>, 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<\/a>, it sits above two skulls. The Studio Museum in Harlem<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\nWhy are signs and symbols so important in Basquiat’s work?<\/h3>\n
How did Banksy bring street art into the museum?<\/h3>\n