This Saturday will BC Gallery in Berlin be presenting KARAMBOLAGE a joint exhibition featuring the work of German artists Heiko Zahlmann and Christoph Hässler, aka Stohead who despite the fact of being the same age, having a background as graffiti writers and even sharing a studio for some time, developed two different ways to approach their writing style. Whilst Stohead grew more and more towards an organic deconstruction of lettering, Heiko Zahlmann focused on a geometrical and almost architectural distortion of his work.
KARAMBOLAGE brings these to artists back together in a contrasting exhibition where Stohead’s soothing and metaphysical abstract calligraphy meets the spatially and geometry of Heiko Zahlmann work.
About the artists
Heiko Zahlmann was born in Hamburg in 1973. An avid graffiti writer, he was included among others in the Guinness Book of World Records. His oeuvre today lies with galleries and institutions, including the City Gallery Prague, the Kunsthalle Krems, the art space Kreuzberg-Berlin, at de Pury & Luxembourg and the Museum for Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. For years, Heiko Zahlmann was active worldwide in urban areas, making concrete walls his image carriers. His graffiti past is evident in his work today. Concrete, colour, font and often site-specific details – the basic elements remain the same. And yet his work has evolved considerably. His spatial wall works move between architecture, sculpture, painting and drawing. Working in situ, they refer to the area and its surrounding.
Also born in 1973 in Schwäbisch Hall, Germany, Berlin-based artist Christoph Hässler aka Stohead,had his first meeting with graffiti back in 1989, and in 1999 when he joined the artist group Getting-Up with which he created some of the biggest graffiti murals and exhibitions in the early stages of the new graffiti art movement. Stohead has always focused his work around the art of writing and plays with all kinds of different handwritten letterings. His journey from classic tag lettering to abstract painting has brought him to the complete decomposition of letters to an absolute abstract form. It is in this decomposition that he has developed his unique painting style using several different techniques and media.
KARAMBOLAGE opens on April 2 and will be on view until May 7, 2016 at BC Gallery located on Libauer Str. 14, 10245 Berlin.
Heiko Zahlmann “Untitled” – Varnish on Light Concrete- 63 x 63 cm – 2016
Heiko Zahlmann & Stohead – detail photo of a collaboration work
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
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