Graffiti and Street Art Paintings

The history of painting traces back to artworks created by prehistoric artists who left marks in caves where they passed. Similarly to territorial marking in prehistoric rock art, modern graffiti artists have written their names on trains and city walls with a spray can or a marker to get reputation, whereas street artists have used stencils or collages to express themselves and bring art in our daily life.

However and although the Graffiti and Street Art movement, also known as Urban Art, emerged as an illegal practice in the streets, the traditional art world didn’t take long to absorb it. Graffiti first found its way into art galleries in the 1970s. Curators invited graffiti artists to paint original artworks on canvas and promoted their graffiti art paintings as an exciting new trend in the art world. As art buyers started to open their collections to Graffiti Art, the first medium they looked after was paintings on canvas. These first graffiti artworks for sale that came out were either abstract graffiti paintings, which transposed the kinetic energy of graffiti on canvas like to work of Futura 2000 or paintings based on letters with the work of Crash, or even figurative paintings depicting the urban landscapes cherished by graffiti artists, as seen in the work of another graffiti pioneer: Daze.

Graffiti writers often paint their canvases with the medium they know better: the spray can. Theses spray painted canvases from graffiti artists are highly sought-after among urban art collectors and are now more easily accessible. Indeed, they can be discovered and bought directly from the first specialized online platform for Graffiti Art: Urbaneez. On the other hand, the transition from the street to the gallery was smoother for street artists. Their straightforward and visual creations were more accessible to communicate with a large audience, hence the immediate success of street art paintings on the art market. Today, street art paintings sell as much as contemporary art paintings from artists with a fine art background, and Banksy’s artworks keep setting records at auctions.

Discover paintings online from world-renowned graffiti and street artists on Urbaneez and browse our online catalogue of original paintings made by both emerging talents and pioneers of the movement, such as New York graffiti artists Cope2, Crash, Daze, Lady Pink or JonOne and French street artists like Jef Aérosol, Clet Abraham or C215. On the online platform Urbaneez which focuses on original artworks of Urban Art, you can also find paintings from urban artists who have gone from the street to the museum, such as graffiti artists Stohead, Ceet Fouad, Zenoy, L’Atlas or Rafael Silks, whose calligraphic artworks inspired by Brazilian pixação are exhibited at the museum for Graffiti and Street Art of Amsterdam.