i think my house in kreuzberg gets cleaned once in two weeks. clean­ing in ber­lin means over­paint­ing tags on the doors and on the house. i like that. not because of clean houses but because i’m curi­ous about who is tak­ing part on this pub­lic exhib­i­tion the next two weeks. it is like a con­tin­ued loop about who passed by my house or which artists are in the city right now. I love the sur­prise when i step out of my house and still feel the energy of the last night in form of some new graf­fiti on the wall.

it is some­thing that for me strongly belongs to ber­lin and that is rep­res­ent­ing the often lost free­dom to express your­self in form of cre­ativ­ity and life­style. it fills the city with a cer­tain drive and for me walk­ing to the next bakery to buy break­fast is like read­ing the morn­ing newspaper.

tak­ing this inspir­a­tion of the streets to a gal­lery is what the guys of skal­itzers con­tem­por­ary are doing. after their first big bang — the cope2 tag exhib­i­tion– they are con­stantly search­ing for the con­nec­tion between street tags and the con­tem­por­ary art world. they do so while exhib­it­ing artists that are work­ing in the urban envir­on­ment as well as trans­lat­ing their work onto can­vas. this approach works out pretty well as you can see in the latest exhib­i­tion with streetartist danny gretscher.

to get an even closer con­nec­tion to the streets — skal­itzers will have an ongo­ing tag exhib­i­tion dur­ing the whole of august. tag­gers can visit the gal­lery, leave their mark and let their tag be doc­u­mented in a later released book.