WELCOME BACK

In 2016, the Colab Gallery will be celebrating its decennial existence, incl.  the period of  the Carhartt Gallery : This milestone birthday will be celebrated with the two annual exhibitions of 2016. As a start the exhibition „Welcome Back“ will take place on the weekend before the Art Basel, starting on 11th of June.

In the past ten years a lot has happened, both in urban art as well as in the Colab Gallery.  While during 2006 arguments about realigning the scene from graffiti towards/to street and urban art and about the connected conceptualities derived, it was nevertheless foreseeable  that urban art would become a serious art direction. Today in 2016, the hypernym „Urban Art“  is generally accepted and has become part of  the canon of art history.

Urban Art is ubiquitous and zeitgeist and at the same time it is already influencing and changing popular culture. Many of the players of that time are now well on their way to becoming the next generation of contemporary  artists. For the first time, in the upcoming exhibition „Welcome Back“, only/exclusively artists, that have already exhibited in the Colab Gallery or the Carhartt Gallery, have been invited.

Including over 150 artists from all over the world over the past ten years, it has been a very difficult task to decide which of  them to invite, as each one has been of importance to the gallery. Nonetheless, many different trends of urban art could be observed over the last ten years. By matter of the compilation, we have successfully chosen some  of the protagonists of these trends in order  to repeatedly show the audience the diversity and virtuosity within the art form of urban art.

With the exhibition „Welcome Back“ the Colab Gallery would like to say “thank you” for the long-term support of the scene and of the lovers of Urban Art:
For  established graffiti and urban art artists trusted us as right from the start and were prepared to collaborate with a new and unknown gallery. Their experience and fame combined with our commitment and idealism prepared the grounds for what became the Colab Gallery.

Another important element of our concept right from the beginning was looking for and finding talents.The more our reputation as a gallery grew, the more effort we put into supporting unknown artists. Today we are very proud, that more than a small number of well-esteemed artists of the urban art scene made some of their first international exhibitional experiences in the Colab Gallery.

The Colab Gallery funds/supports artists directly. This is the reason why also in the  upcoming exhibition a certain capacity of space is  held back for the constantly growing in-house collection of art of the past ten years.

Needless to say, that also collectors of print and editions will get their piece of cake.

We will be delighted to introduce to you ALEXONE, AMOSE and L`OUTSIDER from France, DOPPELDENK and MARK GMEHLING from Germany, as well as ARYZ from Spain, ANDERS GJENNESTAD from Norway, DREAM from Switzerland and PANTONE from Argentina.