Contemporary Graffiti Fine Art Street Art Online Fabian Zolar

I started painting Graffiti at the age of 12.

At that time Graffiti was far away from any acceptance as an art form and was widely considered as being merely a contemporary youth movement and the means for expresing political opinion. I started painting with friends, getting the first cans and going out to paint to have a good time. We would hang out together, drawing sketches all day long and just were kind of very creative young people searching for new ways of expressing our senses.

In the first years I focused on exploring the boundaries of any style graffiti represented at that time. From 2D Letter Graffiti I went to 3D Styles, from graffiti characters to realistic portraits. By the age of 19 I made a painting trip to south america, painted in many cities, amongst others in Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires. This time opened up my mind for a more artistic view on Graffiti. Back in Germany I started to paint my first canvas paintings, starting to dissolve the boundaries of the Graffiti form I was studying into the abstract form I am painting today.

Graffiti for me is non political - it can, but it does not have to convey an explicit message. In my work I consider Graffiti as purely a language of forms, as the underlying speech system of my painting´s language. A Letter, from which early Graffiti in its purest form derives, could be regarded as a symbol for a representation in the real world - and therefore it could be regarded as figurative (as well as a painting is, like Rene Magritte demonstrated in "Ceci n´est pas un pipe").

By abstracting the graffiti form I am creating the Abstraction of the Abstract, a purely abstract form, a second level abstraction which in its intrigate shapes is my form of 21st century abstraction. The works on The Abstraction Of The Abstract you can follow in the category "Abstract Graffiti".

In a world with towns like concrete jungles, walls are the suitable canvas for contemporary painting.