232 pages Edited by Christoph Platz-Gallus & Larissa Kikol Designed by Mina Fina, & Ivian Kan Mujezinović 29,6 x 22,3 cm Language: English & German Paperback Publisher: DCV 2026
The outdoors has become a school, the urban underworld a studio, and boundless anti-authoritarianism has replaced the influence of the academy and the market. Art movements and Hidden Masters have emerged here that are now also making their presence felt institutionally. Some have a graffiti background, others studied painting, while some were once urban trespassers who painted in places where they had to evade the authorities. The art that has grown out of this can best be described using three terms: abstraction, autonomy, and—depending on one’s perspective—post-vandalism.
The recently concluded exhibition Under the Milky Way at Kunstverein Hannover presented compelling positions from these scenes across Europe. It was not a graffiti exhibition, but rather showcased an artistic transfer that brings abstract painting and other practices into the museum space. It brings together rough-hewn ideas, irony, autonomous art, as well as conceptual and anarchic approaches. At times, an art of art emerges uninvited—sometimes shaped by political attitudes, sometimes by the freedom to do precisely what one feels compelled to do.
The book accompanying the exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover brings together key protagonists of this development in a constellation that has never existed in quite this form before. They come from heterogeneous urban and artistic scenes, yet repeatedly find themselves under the Milky Way: driven by a progressive itch in their fingers, calling for a freedom of action that seems scarcely possible in broad daylight.
