Unique exhibition and book showcase street art

Prague - An exhibition titled Street Art Prague attempts to capture the ephemeral art of the streets, prepared by curators of the Školská 28 gallery. It includes a unique collection of stickers and spray-paints peeled from the walls of buildings or lamps, documentation of these expressions, and current works for this exhibition by well-known street artists. The exhibition, which will last until November 27, will be complemented by a catalog published by Arbor vitae.
    According to the organizers, the monograph on street art in Prague over the past five years is of great significance, especially because street art disappears very quickly. The book features over 450 pages with nearly 900 stickers and spray-paints. The organizers consider this record very important - descendants may regard this type of artistic expression as one of the few authentic artistic outputs of the early 21st century.
    Stickers and stencils are the youngest part of street art, whose most well-known form, graffiti, appeared in large Western cities about 30 years ago. Stickers and stencils emerged in Western countries about ten years ago, and in the post-communist bloc about four years ago. Prague was among the first, says collector István Lékó, who has gathered a unique collection of artifacts and photographs of both Czech and international street art over the past five years.
    Stickers are pasted everywhere, but the most popular places are traffic signs, traffic lights, downspouts, poles, electrical and gas equipment boxes, and the like. Usually, there are multiple stickers at once - in every major city, there are hundreds of places where stickers are pasted one next to the other at about two meters high. Such a group of stickers looks like a street exhibition of small images.
    The content of the stickers is diverse, sometimes featuring absurd, grotesque, ironic, or humorous messages, but the themes are often political. Sometimes, it is an author’s protest against the closure of the spheres of academic art. The stickers usually contain text, a few words, at least the sign of the author or group of authors, so-called crew. The authors are mostly young people, and a significant element is anonymity. Stickers are almost exclusively pasted in the evening hours or at night.
    Individual artists photograph their stickers and stencils and then publish them on the internet, but a book on stickers has not yet been published in Prague. In contrast, the Prague graffiti scene was detailed in a book released last year by author Martina Overstreet. The publication titled In Graffiti We Trust summarizes the development that the Prague graffiti scene has undergone from 1989 to the present.