Stencil graffiti as an art form began in the 1960s. Today it is usually a part of
Street Art, in style writing
graffiti stencils are not used much or their use is often disguised or not valued. French artist
Ernest Pignon-Ernest stencilled life-size silhouettes of a nuclear bomb victim in the south of France in 1966 (Plateau d'Albion, Vaucluse) with paint and a brush. Conceptual artists and other artists worked illegally with street stencils in public space since the late 1960s, among them Canadian artist group
General Idea in 1969,
Chaz Bojorguez in Los Angeles, who started in the same year, Polish conceptual artist
Jerzy Trelinski in 1975, New York environmental conceptual artist
John Fekner in 1976 or Moscow conceptualist duo
SZ group in 1980.
Alex Vallauri began with stencil graffiti in his home town Sao Paulo in 1978 and was the first to start a larger stencil graffiti movement there. Vallauri's (anonymous) stencils were published in France since 1982 and had a larger impact on the New Yorker and later Polish stencil graffiti movements around
David Wojnarowicz and
Thomaz Sikorski. Dutch artist
Hugo Kaagman is one of the key figures of the Amsterdam punk movement. While studying social geography at the city’s municipal university, he became interested in art movements like
Dada and
Fluxus. He started stencil graffiti in 1978 as part of the punk movement to demonstrate against the Dutch government.
Blek le Rat claims his first spray painted stencils appeared in Paris in 1981. This early start is apparently based only on his own statements; verifiable press reports on Blek do not appear until July 1984. Blek stated he was influenced by the graffiti artists of New York City but wanted to create something of his own. Australian photographer
Rennie Ellis documented some of the earliest examples of stencil art to appear in
Sydney and
Melbourne in his 1985 book
The All New Australian Graffiti. In the introduction to the book, Ellis noted that US photographer
Charles Gatewood had written to him and sent him photographs of similar stencil graffiti that had recently appeared in
New York City, leading Ellis to speculate that: ... unlike our subway-style graffiti, which is nothing more than a copy of a well-established New York tradition, the symbols of Australia and America had originated separately and unknown to each other. video game controller on the
Berlin Wall in 2005 Over the years this form of graffiti has become a worldwide subculture. The members are linked through the Internet and the images spray-painted on the urban canvas they place throughout the world. Many of its members connect through blogs and websites that are specifically built to display works, get feedback on posted works, and receive news of what is going on in the world of stencil graffiti. Stencil graffiti is illegal in some jurisdictions, and many of the members of this subculture shroud their identities in aliases.
Above /
Tavar Zawacki,
Banksy,
Blek le Rat,
Vhils,
Shepard Fairey and
Jef Aérosol are some names that are synonymous with this subculture. == See also ==