Urban art festival awaits urban art lovers in Pécs from 24 May to 22 September. Renowned street artists from Hungary and abroad will present their work at the Street Up international exhibition in the Zsolnay Cultural Quarter. Art of skate a skateboarding exhibition can be seen at the downtown Pécs Gallery, and hip-hop and skateboarding demonstrations, professional workshops, lectures and guided tours will also be part of the festival's programme until September.
In the 21st century, street art as an independent art form is unavoidable.In 2024, the Zsolnay Heritage Management NKft. Pécs Galleries - Visual Art Centre would like to further expand the range of its genre.
At the beginning of the summer, a comprehensive urban art exhibition series and festival will present the antecedents, domestic and foreign appearances and different trends of urban art, which has been progressively developing since the 1970s, both in the m21 and the In Pécs Gallery between 24 May and 22 September.
One of the highlights of the event is the ART OF SKATE – the skateboard from California to Pécs which tells the history and art of skateboarding from its first attempts until it became an Olympic sport in 2021. The exhibition presents skateboards made by around 150 artists, relics of the skateboarding lifestyle, related fashion and art, photographs and cultural phenomena.
In 2022, more than 50,000 people visited the exhibition in Paris. Curated by Philippe Danjean is an independent curator, art professional and renowned collector of urban art. The exhibition is open from 24 May to 15 September at the Pécs Gallery.
In the m21 Gallery in the Zsolnay Quarter, the title exhibition of the festival, the street art STREET UP exhibition, open from 30 May to 22 September, by the international independent curator Yasha Young was created in collaboration with. The 5 artists represented in the exhibition are recognised and sought-after international street art artists: Nuno Viegas From Portugal, Christian Boehmer and Adultremix From Germany, Julien de Casabianca from France and the most talked about creator of street art books Millo From Italy.
At the invitation of the gallery, the French Erell, who was the special prize winner of last year's LOKART in Pécs, the French-Austrian duo Jana and JS, the Polish NDZW and the Romanian Lost Optic, all of whom are well-known and popular artists from street art festivals (including the annual Vienna Street Art Festival), as well as from the Venezuelan Zeus Salas.
In addition to the international field, the exhibition will also present outstanding Hungarian street art artists: Imre Fork, Void, Fat Heat, Gospe, MNU, Mejo, Shit-Shot, and also Napush and FSing. Imre Fork, a cult figure in Hungarian graffiti art, will be this year's creator of the Carpet of Light covering Janus Pannonius Street at the Zsolnay Festival of Light in July. The street art of Pécs Renesound are represented by the works of.
French artist creating conceptual art from urban signs Société Réaliste, Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy's conceptual works, like urban art, focus on and reinterpret the signs of social publicity. Their works mark a possible end point for urban art and its encounter with contemporary art.
The Visual Arts Centre of the Zsolnay Heritage Management aims to bring peripheral genres of urban art to the public. This year's exhibition will allow visitors to vote on which works they would like to see outside the gallery walls at the next Street UP event.
Art of skate - Skateboarding from California to Pécs, straight from Paris
The Art of skate was first held in Paris in 2022, where it attracted around 50,000 visitors in six weeks. It presents the history of skateboarding, its cultural embeddedness and its relationship with art, looking at the history of skateboarding in Hungary!
The fickle weather of the 1950s forced surfers to find a way to keep their favourite activity going in windless conditions. A surfboard, a few tinkered skate wheels and the precursor to the skateboard was born.
The free-spirited spirit of surfers embraced this new sport, and it wasn't long before they started customising their home-made boards. Over time, however, industrial craftsmanship took the place of DIY, and boarding became a movement in its own right, soon becoming part of the underground and counterculture.
In the years that followed, it went from being a simple pastime to a way of life for many young people. Skate parks were built, providing dedicated areas for the sport. Skateboard culture also developed, with its own music, fashion and graphic styles.
Today, skateboarding is a global phenomenon, with hundreds of millions of people taking part in the sport, which has been an Olympic sport since 2021. Who would have imagined that, as a competitive sport in the modern Olympic Games, the 2024 Paris Olympics would be held in Concorde Square.
With the acceptance and popularity of skateboarding, artistic opportunities for skateboarders, brands and artists have multiplied. For example, artworks from different eras have been displayed on skateboards. This is how Pécs-born Victor Vasarely got his own tribute board. Famous New York graffiti artists Lady Pink, Kenny Scharf, Andy Warhol and Cleon Peterson are also playfully featured on these boards.
In fact, skateboards can be not only a surface for artistic expression, but also a raw material, as demonstrated by the work of Japanese artist Haroshi, who creates sculptures from recycled boards.
The Art of skate was first held in Paris in 2022, where it attracted around 50,000 visitors in six weeks. It presents the history of skateboarding, its cultural embeddedness and its relationship with art, looking at the history of skateboarding in Hungary, to which Deák 17 Gallery The street is not a playground we borrowed documents from the exhibition. The exhibition also presents - without claiming to be exhaustive - some of the most important figures and associations of contemporary Hungarian skateboarding culture and art.
Curator of the exhibition: Philippe Danjean, independent urban art curator and collector
Expert advice and image: Dávid Lizom
Artistic director: Valéria Fekete ( ZSÖK - Centre for Visual Arts)
Street-Up exhibition opened at the m21 Gallery in Pécs
The exhibition, which is part of the Street-Up festival in the city, promises to go beyond traditional art exhibitions: it offers a forum for social dialogue where visitors can actively participate in the reinterpretation of art and public spaces.
The social role of artistic expression
Since the 1970s, street art as an art form has become an inescapable part of urban culture, where social messages are displayed in visual form on the walls of big cities. The Pécs exhibition will bring together prominent representatives from the worlds of art, business and academia in an ambassador programme to communicate the artists' work to the public.
Symbiosis of international and local artists
The "Street-Up" exhibition features works by a number of international and national artists. Five of the foreign participants will be presented in Pécs by Yasha Young, an international independent curator.
Yasha Young, founder and independent curator of the Urban Nation museum in Berlin, who helped conceptualise the event.
Yasha Young and yashayoungproject:
Yasha Young is a graduate in museology from Harvard University, associate professor at the Pop Academy in Mannheim, and founder and executive director of URBAN NATION, Berlin, the world's first museum dedicated exclusively to urban contemporary art, from 2013 to 2019. He is also the creator of several international projects. Currently, as Concept Developer and Executive Curator at FOR_M New York City, Yasha continues to redefine cultural boundaries and is committed to the social engagement of art.
The Yasha Young project represents a number of street and urban art artists.
In addition, Erell from France, the Franco-Austrian artist couple Jana and JS, Polish NDZW and Romanian Lost Optic, and Venezuelan Zeus Salas, who are also well-known figures in international street art festivals, will be guests at the exhibition.
Among the prominent representatives of the Hungarian street art scene are Imre Fork, Void, Fat Heat, Gospe, MNU, Mejo, Shit-Shot, Napush, FSing, and Renesound from the local community.
Interactivity and social inclusion
One of the main attractions of the exhibition is that it not only invites visitors to view the exhibition, but also gives them the opportunity to directly shape the cultural image of the city. Through active public participation and voting, the exhibition space goes beyond the traditional gallery function and becomes a real community space.
Art as a community tool
M21 Gallery's exhibition is therefore more than an art show: it is an initiative that focuses on art as a tool for social change. Under the direction of artistic director Valeria Fekete, the exhibition focuses on a socially engaged, dynamic form of street art, promoting intercultural dialogue and strengthening human relations.
