The exhibition Street Art – Banksy & Co has opened in Bologna — a retrospective on the history of urban art from New York to Italy, from the eighties to the present day.
Following the controversy sparked by artist Blu's decision to erase his murals in Bologna, on 18 March Street Art – Banksy & Co opened at Palazzo Pepoli, a historic building in the Emilian capital. On show are more than 250 works of street art — a term that encompasses all those art forms, from graffiti, known among those who create it as writing, to muralism, that find their natural home on urban surfaces. Also on display in Italy for the first time are 150 works donated by painter Martin Wong to the Museum of the City of New York in 1994, which trace the origins of this art form in the American metropolis during the eighties.
Bologna is the Italian capital of street art, and the first major retrospective on the history of this artistic genre in our country could only have taken place here. The idea for the exhibition arose following the "detachment" and restoration of eight works by Blu, Italy's most celebrated street artist, in Bologna, his home city. A team of restorers managed to remove the works from the walls that housed them without damaging them. According to Fabio Roversi Monaco, president of Genus Bononiae, the organisation hosting the exhibition, the works were located "within private industrial premises, in the process of being definitively demolished" and were "not visible" to the public. Hence the decision to remove them in order to preserve them, with the consent of the walls' owners. Three of these works are on display in the exhibition, including the twelve-metre-tall untitled mural from 2006.
The aim is to safeguard street art by giving it space within a museum, so that it may be studied and recognised for its important historical role. Because it "raises new, difficult and complicated questions", according to Street Art – Banksy & Co curator Christian Omodeo, questions that we are not yet able to answer because "how many professors teaching courses on street art are there in European universities? How many museum curators are there who have a thorough knowledge of the history of these movements? Very few."
