Graffiti & Bananas
Street Art

Is this art, or does it go into the bin? Graffiti and Street Art polarise. Vandalism and damage to property in the eyes of some, added value or even art for the city and its inhabitants for others. 

Born as a US American subculture in the 1960s, graffiti has today conquered urban space all over the world. Since the 1980s a street art scene has developed in Linz, which came of age and became attractive for tourism and business at the latest with the foundation of the Mural Harbor. Ranging from sprayed signatures, political slogans, stencil images and stickers on dustbins to colourful large-scale paintings, these exclamation marks directed against the establishment pepper Linz’s urban landscape. Unauthorised art invades the city and playfully raises the question of who public space belongs to. Heteronomy, permission culture, and self-empowerment as parts of our social structure have significantly been gaining in importance in this context, especially since Covid-19 took on pandemic dimensions. 

The exhibition documents for the first time the development of graffiti and Street Art in Linz. Photos, reports and contemporary works of art testify to an urban movement whose pithy pictorial language paints the social climate on the walls of our city.