For ’Shallow Then Halo’, Shoe has turned the exhibition space into a gezamtkunstwerk consisting of a room-filling mural and a selection of his most recent painting series ‘and/or’ created in Berlin last spring. In these works the artist has undergone a survey into his artistic developments within the last 30 years. The presentation as a whole could be seen as a mini mid-career retrosprective showcasing all the stages of his practice from 1990 until 2021, ranging through graffiti, calligraffiti to his most recent abstract vandalistic signature styles.
The titles of the works feature a dual and/or: a binary opposition that aims to point towards his personal and artistic duality. Coherence versus the contradictory, struggle versus harmony, failure versus victory, a perpetual research towards the borders of his artistic persona. The works as whole will be showcased on the walls of the spaced painted in bright pastel colours, turning the presentation into a playful time capsule, a contemporary period room illustrating the many challenges and current position in Shoe’s career.
Niels Shoe Meulman (1967) is an Amsterdam based visual artist, known for his gestural paintings which reveal vivid traces of graffiti and calligraphy. He revolutionised the art of writing when he initiated the Calligraffiti movement, claiming “a word is an image and writing is painting”. Being a graffiti pioneer, Shoe tagged along with New York counterparts like Dondi White, Rammellzee and Keith Haring in the 1980s. Equally influenced by abstract expressionist painters and pop artists, he gradually found a unique way to translate street attitude to galleries and museums. Experimenting within the traditional medium of paint-on-canvas, but also unafraid to venture into other domains like conceptual installations and poetry, Niels Shoe Meulman keeps pushing the limits of the global urban contemporary art movement. H
Shoe’s work can be found in te permanent collections of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Museum of Graffiti, Miami and several international private collections.
Recent (solo) exhibitions include : Het HEM, Zaandam ; , Netherlands What the fuck? Straat Museum Amsterdam, Netherland ; Negative Space Museum of Graffiti gallery Miami, United States ; Unstallation, Ghost Galerie Marseille ; Unidenticals and Reverse Paintings, Galerie Droste Wuppertal, Germany ; Uncontrolled Substances, Galerie Gabriel Rolt ; White Walls gallery San Francisco, United States ; Saatchi & Saatchi gallery ,Auckland, New Zealand.
-Text by Sara van Bussel