Art: Royal West of England Academy graffiti exhibition

Monday 9th March 2009

It’s taken 20 years, but Bristol’s celebrated street art and graffiti scene has finally stormed back into the rarified atmosphere of one of our most important galleries.

Back in 1985, the Arnolfini hosted Graffiti Art In Britain and was the first major gallery in the city to stage an exhibition dedicated to the underground scene which has gone on to spawn some of our most successful artists.

With the art world’s eyes and chequebooks focussing ever more on the Bristol graffiti scene, the Royal West of England Academy is now taking the baton for a new retrospective from March 21-May 2 entitled Crimes Of Passion: Street Art In Bristol.

The RWA’s ambitious exhibition will include installations and murals across the city as well as film screenings, talks and a schools education programme.

Drawing from a pool of 45 of the city’s graffiti artists, the exhibition hopes to not only provide a comprehensive overview of the past 20 years of street art in Bristol but also give a few hints as to the new directions that some of the artists will take in the future.

The careers of our most celebrated – and notorious – artist Banksy as well as one of the original exponents of graffiti art in the early 80s, Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja, has been well documented.

So instead the RAWA’s exhibition concentrates on other leading exponents.

As a contemporary artist with Del Naja dating back to the early 80s, Nick Walker, aka the Aping Angel, has seen his art featured in movies such as Hackers, Judge Dredd and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

Influenced by punk rock album graphics, 2000AD comics and seminal New York hip-hop artists, Inkie was also another rising star of the street art scene in the arly 80s.

In 1989 he came second in the World Street Art championships beating fierce competition from Los Angeles, New York and all major European countries. Later that year he hit the national headlines, when he was arrested along with 72 other writers as the kingpin in the UK’s largest ever graffiti bust Operation Anderson. His arrest, court case and subsequent acquittal was documented by the BBC in the programme Drawing The Line.

In the late 1990s, Inkie collaborated with Banksy on the UK’s largest ever graffiti event, Walls On Fire, where they pulled together the country’s finest street artists to create 1.4 km-lomg painting around Bristol’s docks.

More recently he has been an integral part of the Shoreditch-based Secret Wars collective, who have taken their infamous live street art battles across the UK and Europe. Among those also featured in the exhibition are Filthy Luker, FLX, Sickboy, Cyclops and Rowdy.

Royal West of England Academy, Queen’s Road, Clifton. Telephone 0117 973 5129. Opening times: Mon-Sat 10am-5.30pm. Sunday 2-5pm. Admission is £4, £2.50 concs. Entry for children is free of charge.

STEVE HARNELL