Category Archives: Walls & Murals

The graffiti wave spilled over to Berlin in the early 1980s. The first pieces were created directly on the Berlin Wall. But only with the fall of the wall did the whole city become a huge playground for the writer scene. Protagonists like the ghettostars crew or magazine editor Adrian Nabi tell about the exciting time.

The graffiti movement in Berlin developed very slowly until the fall of November 1989. This is partly due to the fact that Berlin was an island and you didn’t have many opportunities to travel, but partly because Berlin graffiti artists had the Berlin Wall at their disposal. Which was so unique because you didn’t have to go to the city’s backyards to try it out. Stylistically, this period has produced numerous interesting graffiti artists who have influenced many other generations. But after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city opened and a wave of graffiti never seen before in Europe not only covered the west of the German capital. Whether qualitatively or qualitatively, the Berlin graffiti movement is setting new standards after these years and is shaping a new image of street graffiti in Europe. During this time, the GHETTOSTARS crew also formed, which exemplifies a Berlin graffiti generation, which shows how intensively this graffiti era was lived at that time. At the same time, the curator and BACKJUMPS magazine editor ADRIAN NABI brings the first New York graffiti artists to Berlin and regularly travels to the Big Apple to look for sources of inspiration. He finds this, for example, in interviews with DONDI, who has shaped and influenced European style writing like no other, especially in Berlin.

Darco and Gawki go to the German school in Paris and found the sprayer group FBI-Crew in 1985. They become an integral part of the Paris graffiti movement, with a very typical city style. Paris was the center of the European scene, but writers in Munich, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Copenhagen also gave new impulses and influenced each other.