Graffiti as an art

DPA

His hair is thinning and flecked with grey. His belly is beginning to show a little beneath a brown T-shirt sporting the slogan “Life begins.” But when Jens Mueller, a German graffiti artist known as Tasso, picks up a spray can and sets to work on a canvas none of it matters.
“I can live from my pictures,” says Tasso, who recently celebrated his 50th birthday. “I never dreamed of that 25 years ago.” In the early 1980s, Tasso, from the state of Saxony in Germany’s former communist east, used to steal paint to spray the names of his favourite bands on the walls of his hometown, Meerane.
When the Iron Curtain came down in 1989, a world of opportunity was opened up to him. With the so-called welcome money that the West German government gave to East Germans who came across the border he bought a black Edding marker pen and later borrowed money from his grandmother to buy a box of spray paints.
“My goal [was to create] Meerane’s first graffiti,” he says. Graffiti soon became his mission in life, though he also trained as a butcher and worked on building sites. As he reached his mid 20s and his friends began settling down, Tasso preferred to head into the night with 15-year-olds and some spray paint. Far away from the big city and the urban scene, he began to develop his own style. While other graffiti artists tended towards portraying gangsters with guns, Mueller painted “kitsch” landscapes and scenes that looked almost like photos.
He experimented to find the perfect skin tones for his subjects. His breakthrough came at the Meeting of Styles, an international graffiti art festival which began in the German city of Wiesbaden and now holds events all over the world. “Tasso undoubtedly still belongs to the absolute elite — nationally and internationally,” says Maxi Kretzschmar. The Leipzig gallery owner, who specializes in graffiti — also known as street art and urban art — says it is the art of the digital age.
The exchange between artists and the distribution of pictures has been strengthened by social media, he says. Marco Schwalbe, of the Munich-based Stroke art fair, the first and only German fair focusing on urban art, also believes graffiti has great potential as a future market.
He estimates that around 500,000 euros (550,000 dollars) worth of graffiti is sold as art in Germany each year. “But this market is growing, and contemporary art will also open up,” he says. Urban art is still largely ignored by Germany’s more classical art scene.
But in a few years people won’t be able to tell the difference between urban art and other contemporary artworks, says Schwalbe, pointing to the United States, where “new contemporary art” has long been part of the scene.
Tasso and his crew, the artists group Ma’Claim, are some of Germany’s top graffiti artists and are internationally recognized, he adds. But Tasso has only recently begun calling himself an artist. He began making his living from graffiti in the mid-1990s, when he started taking on commissions.
He now takes on around 30 commissions a year. “If I’m honest, the financial security was and is really important to me,” admits Tasso. His glass is “more than half full,” he adds. And he doesn’t feel old, even among his graffiti artist colleagues where even those ten years younger than him are generally regarded as ancient.
He is however beginning to have problems with his shoulder “after 25 years with a spray can” in his hand. “I do ask myself every now and then what will happen when I can’t paint any more,” he says thoughtfully.
His Plan B would be writing books, he says. He doesn’t have any other ideas as yet.
For his birthday he gave himself the best present, by printing a limited edition book taking stock of his work and telling of his travels around the world.
Only 500 copies of the book “Am Ende fehlt doch immer was” (Something’s always missing in the end) are available, with the first 100 also including a piece of canvas from an artwork that Tasso painted especially to go with the book and then cut up.