Abstract / Urban
In essence, urban art was born of experimentation and abstraction. The wildstyle, the scratch, the collage of sampled sounds, b-boys battling against gravity... Slanted, on its head - challenging perceptions across the cultural spectrum.
In this new book we examine the birth, fusion, and evolution of urban arts through a series of landmark works. Discussing defining moments and key contributors with the those who drove and bore witness.
This isn’t a hip-hop who’s who or an A-Z of style writers. This is about the challengers, the left-turns, the pioneers, the forgotten, the fearless, the upsetters... the game changers.
We Join the dots, crossing the tracks, focusing on the works that redefined the art form.
"Back in 2011, working with Daniel Feral I curated and published Futurism 2.0, a snap shot of the rising Grafuturism movement and some of its key artists. While the book focused on artists who had come from a traditional writing (graffiti) background who were now (then) painting abstract works on walls and canvas, it was long established that 'abstraction' had always been a part of their practice - wildstyle pieces, deconstructed letterforms etc were omnipresent since the birth of Style Writing.
Since F2.0 I have been compiling content and writing on abstraction & experimentation across the wider gamut of urban arts, preparing for this book. In its pages we travel from a decaying, late 1970's metropolis to our modern digital age, where filtering has become the greatest challenge in discovering anything."
Rob Swain
Find out more about this project here.