“Graffiti” at Museion, Bolzano

At Museion in Bolzano, a large exhibition devoted to graffiti, simply titled Graffiti, occupies the third and fourth floors. Co-curated by Leonie Radine, Museion’s curator, and the artist Ned Vena, the six-month-long show features an extensive roster of artists, primarily ones connected to New York. The conspicuous omission of artists from Bolzano is a curatorial decision that is openly acknowledged, if not fully unpacked. Graffiti loses something when filtered too cleanly through canonical, globally legible taste. Including local voices—particularly those that do not conform to the polished grammar of the art world—might have introduced some helpful friction and context, maybe even necessary discomfort, which would arguably have been in keeping with the spirit of the medium.

Instead, a narrative spanning vandalism to institutionalization and saturation traces a cleaner line, emphasizing the spray can as another extension of the painter’s arm, from mid-century abstraction onward. The accompanying booklet gestures toward tagging as code, as survival, as refusal, yet its urgency dissipates in the actual gallery experience. The walls at Museion display fragments of sanctioned transgressive material—mostly spray-painted words from those already known and/or canonized: Lawrence Weiner, Monica Bonvicini, SoiL Thornton.

Several individual works are fascinating on their own or in groupings formed by the exhibition’s four sections: “Spray Painting” (tracking the invention of the spray can in the 1950s), “Painting Graffiti” (reframing graffiti in the terms of a postwar painterly lineage), “Contemporaries: Spray Painting + Painting Graffiti” (a looser, cross-generational mix of both), and “Making Cities,” a scenographic floor mimicking an actual street. My experience didn’t strictly adhere to this structure; making my own connections across the categories, tracing the outlines of other conversations that the show implicitly invites, intentionally or not.
 
Heike-Karin Föll’s works are the first to greet you as you step out of the elevator. The canvases combine printed text fragments with gestural spray, as in total femme (2016), and works that question lines and lineages, more often than not the masculine histories of both painting and graffiti. The latter are also just beautiful, full stop. Darboven hated Richter’s Paintings (2016) and not about something (2016) hold their own, and also dialogue wonderfully with a smaller Martin Barré, 67-Z-19-43×40 (1967), a monochrome composition of slanted black lines sprayed on a white background, utterly economical yet charged with direction, and other works by artists like David Smith and Charlotte Posenenske. Smith’s Untitled (1959) looks like the cardboard left behind after something else has been repainted. Posenenske’s Untitled (1965–66), framed and bearing the patina of age, even a visible crease from an old fold, also reads almost like a test object—something that might have once been a prop, or a material rehearsal, but has now been asked to be a featured performer.
 
Josephine Pryde’s The New Media Express (2014– ), a miniature passenger train going back and forth across the space, reminds us that, after all, we too are bodies in space. Its slow motion animates a backdrop of stillness, formed in part by other photographic works by Pryde that reintroduce movement as a kind of low-key spectacle. Klara Lidén and Emily Sundblad similarly put us back where some of us belong: on the street, in the corridors that lead to it, inside passages, and among scrap architecture. Scale matters here: Sundblad’s Door to Next Door (2011) is 1:1, real-life scale, direct; Lidén’s four versionsof Untitled (Trashcan) (2013) are too, yet her readymades clearly remain artworks (even if recast into prop-artworks, to make an interesting loop). Their theatrics are measured and controlled, leaving one questioning the intended effect: experience or non-experience, space or non-space? Is a museum real? Of course it is.
 
Some of Föll’s students from UdK Berlin, who came to see the show, remarked that the stickers on Lidén’s trashcans felt “slightly unethical” (their term), meaning they amount to a kind of oversharing. They are the usual “Fuck AfD” stickers that, as Berliners, the students know too well. Familiarity breeds disinterest, which can be dangerous. They preferred Lidén’s electrical boxes (Disco [2020], Essea [2020], ZOWL [2024]), white metal surfaces lined up on the top floor of the exhibition, which look more like their teacher’s canvases. The boxes offer more space to think. More latency. Less symbol, more potential.
 
Taken together, these works begin to give a clearer sense of the show’s perhaps impossible ambitions: to contain a sprawling, historically unruly medium within the legible lines of contemporary art discourse. They evoke a timely and revealing afterimage—of graffiti’s commodification, shaped since the 1980s by speculative markets and new classes of collectors.
 
This is part of the mimetic drift, by which I mean the way the institution begins to want what it once excluded, not to liberate it but to stabilize the institution’s own relevance.¹ The myth gets rewritten—it’s not the outsider pushing in, but the system pulling everything toward it, digesting dissent into aesthetics, commodity, et cetera. Graffiti, once kept at the gate of contemporary art, now finds itself invited back in, almost too eagerly. Not as resistance, but as genre. The show’s very structure reflects this: tags become painterly gestures, performance and detritus become archive, and the once-unsanctioned is reframed as cool literacy. We live in a culture where spectacle absorbs critique, and refusal is assimilated into the content economy. We suffer with it. We are part of this sick reality.
 
Was the institution ever an outsider? The curators say they didn’t want to rest on this usual framing (inside/outside), and yet it’s unavoidable. As graffiti is recast not as a social rupture or symptom of structural abandonment, but as a “natural” evolution of contemporary art history—spray paint as medium, not message—the actual meaning of the words, their territorial insistence, their illegibility, their messiness, falls away.
 
I attended the opening and listened to the official speeches. I was taken by the former mayor of Bolzano, who took the stage saying that he wasn’t really “cultured”. He remarked on a duality: how, walking the streets of Bolzano, he often has to deal with unwanted traces of graffiti, tags that must be removed, cleaned, erased—and yet he can’t help but recall sensuous childhood memories of chalk in his hands, the smell of pavement warmed by summer, a drawing on the ground. I thought it was interesting, this choice of “duality” as a rhetorical frame. But the show doesn’t just stage duality. It wrestles, I think, with something closer to a dilemma—an altogether different kind of ethical animal.
 
The works on view—particularly those by canonical graffiti artists like Blade, Daze, Futura 2000, Rammellzee, and others—stage duality clearly: graffiti as historical art medium and ephemeral street practice, side by side. They mostly appear together, slightly apart from the rest of the show. Duality can be curated, essayed—arranging things next to each other, letting them disagree, hoping for the best. Dilemma, however, is less easily resolved. It calls attention not only to what’s at stake but whose voices, memories, or illegibilities are recoded as context or texture. The show seems to ask this, even when it tries not to.

There is a kind of intentional care at work here—one that made enough room for Vena’s vision, which is also his life, his frame of reference, his context as a former graffiti writer and artist. He is associated with New York’s downtown scenes, the archival sensibility of which informs the show’s logic throughout. The booklet itself transparently frames Vena’s curatorial involvement as deeply personal: “Graffiti was how I found my way into being an artist, but it is also how I see things; things like art, for example.” There’s logic and honesty in building from within your own terrain. But if this curatorial position warrants authenticity, it also inevitably risks some omissions, especially when the exhibition implicitly positions itself as a survey of sorts. The artist list is long, but perhaps not long enough. This, I think, is the crux: graffiti belongs to everyone. Graffiti, in its simplest form, doesn’t care who’s looking. And maybe there’s power in that.
 
If it still holds any charge, graffiti might just be another tool in everyone’s box, not exclusively the artist’s, critic’s, or curator’s. And if it’s not—if it no longer belongs to that diffuse, unstable collective—we have to ask what role it’s playing now, and how that relates to what it once articulated and still might. Or, alternatively, to what has slowly and quietly been taken away from it.
 
Perhaps subjectivity itself, when scaled up, inevitably returns us to politics—or, more precisely, to our experience of time and endings. Brad Kronz’s 2 Perfect (2017), a pair of cuckoo clocks featuring Mr. A, feel like small anchors dropped into an ocean of despair. The appropriation of Mr. A (now a fashion-art-luxury crossover), who is absent from the exhibition’s official roster, complicates things. Citation becomes a silent nod, an if-you-know-you-know gesture steeped in nostalgia. Manuel DeLanda’s early video ISM ISM (1979) captures something similarly unstable in late-1970s New York: a sense of danger, of intervention and erasure, with technology acting as both predator and prey, caught in a chase loop of visibility.²
 
On the same floor, tucked into a kind of blind spot in the “Making Cities” section, Yuji Agematsu’s displays of found detritus zips (2/2007) and zips (2/2013) offer a strange kind of stability. Trash and dust don’t change much over time. There’s a difference between randomness and contingency. What trickles down from reality takes time to register on the pavement. A piece of gum—it doesn’t just take a million years to be broken down, it holds on. The reality is, there is always something sticking to gum. And then there’s Lutz Bacher’s half-mannequin Graffiti (2010), covered in tags and spray paint—disillusioned, abandoned perhaps, but also just there. These artworks don’t resolve anything. They don’t fix our politics into legible slogans or neat solutions. They sustain a sensation of imminent collapse.
 
The actual language of the street—the unruly hash of repeatedly scrawled names and words that cannot be said—is less present in the galleries, but ultimately, inevitably, the show pushes us back into the street. The time of an exhibition is, after all, not the time of the outside world. I took it as an invitation—not nostalgic, not romantic, but pragmatic—to look again at what people are saying on walls: “Free Palestine,” and other signs of resistance that cover this city, and others elsewhere. What’s been pressurized always comes out.
 
at Museion, Bolzano
until September 14, 2025

Gianmaria Andreetta is a writer and curator living in Berlin.