Amsterdam is the hometown of one of graffiti’s most influential artists , Boris Tellegen better known as Delta. He tells Sophy Grimshaw how over the last 20 years, he has seen it change from a city of abandoned buildings to one where street artists are commissioned by leading galleries

This Month, Amsterdam’s W139, an exhibition space for contemporary visual arts, unveils a new group show called Stacked and Scattered. Among the artists commissioned to create new work is Boris Tellegen, fresh from a solo show at the Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London, where he was dubbed “The Netherlands’ most exciting contemporary artist” and “the new Dutch master”. Other recent shows of his paintings and sculpture have been at galleries in Italy, Singapore and Malaysia. But Tellegen, 39, whose three-dimensional graphics evoke the architectural style of celebrated Dutch artist M.C. Escher, hasn’t always been a respected contemporary artist.

He began his career as a plucky teenage graffiti ‘writer’ (the favoured term of the graffiti community since the 1980s), calling himself Delta and leaving his mark along Amsterdam’s streets, whether he was asked to or not.

Tellegen explains: “I chose the name Delta when I was 14 years old. In a way I think it’s a corny name, although it sounded cool when I chose it. Now I prefer to use my own name for the stuff I’m doing, but the name Delta sticks to me and I’m thankful for that.”

The reason the name has stuck is that Tellegen’s use of 3D perspective is seen as a timeline development, one that helped to raise the standard of graffiti to an art form. Like the ‘bubble writing’ of New York artist Phase 2 in the 1970s, which is now seen as one of the quintessential aesthetics of graffiti (rather than just two-dimensional tags and scribbles, though there are still plenty of those about), Tellegen’s work introduced the idea that street art could be accomplished graphic design. Considering that this year, a mural by British graffiti artist Banksy sold for more than £200,000, it seems he was on to something.

“I’m a little ambivalent towards the high profile of graffiti today,” Tellegen confesses. “In my heart I love to think of graffiti culture as being unrecognised by the general public and still being an underground thing by the artist for the artist. But that’s just a romantic idea. I realise that I’m able to do what I do now in part because of the success the movement had above ground. I’m able to sell work to people because graffiti was picked up by the general public.”

Discussing the influence his designs have had on other artists, he says: “It’s like the line of a family tree. There’s a straight line back to the start of bubble letters in New York, and before that, simple tagging. Change comes from little influences over time that alter the way things are done. My work definitely comes from graffiti but it also has influences from my product design education and I’m sure it has cultural influences from my being in The Netherlands.”

Tellegen graduated with a degree in industrial design engineering from the Delft University of Technology in 1994, and his paintings have frequently been compared to industrialist architecture. From designing blueprint-like art in his 20s and 30s to scrawling his designs, uninvited, in public places as a teenager (don’t try this yourself, you may get arrested), Tellegen’s art has always been closely connected to the city’s buildings. “Amsterdam was much less developed in the 1980s,” he remembers. “There were more uncontrolled spaces, like old railways tunnels and abandoned buildings, contrasting with the canals, which are the legacy of high times in the past for the 18th-century traders. Today there’s far more money in the city than there was when I was a teenager.”

As for his work from those days: “Hardly any of my graffiti on buildings from that time has survived, but that’s the nature of street art. With graffiti, a scribble from 20 years ago is like an archaeological find.”

The new, large-scale piece for this month’s Stacked and Scattered exhibition takes city development as its theme. “The idea behind the paper collages I’m making is that they are sort of maps of cities, in an abstract way. It’s work about the way a city grows, with the impression that it’s all controlled and carefully planned, when actually it’s chaos. A city changes because of lots of small decisions made independently,” he points out, echoing the way he described graffiti’s progression as an art form. “In some third world cities, that’s obviously seen, but I think the same goes for the West.”

These days Tellegen’s fans may spot less of his work on walls, but they have been able to see more of his paintings and sculptures in gallery spaces like Amsterdam’s W139 – which he describes as “genuinely very exciting; a non-commercial gallery which shows there’s still space for experimental art in Amsterdam”. He also designs record sleeves, for bands including America’s platinum-selling metal band Linkin Park, explaining: “I really like the medium, but just design for a local label. I like the big surface that the packaging of a vinyl record has.”

He has also been creating limited-edition toy robots. It’s a project he hopes to continue, but it’s on hold for the moment. “I want to do a whole series but just doing these took such a long time! The idea was a series of robots which were based on words that were cool in the 1980s, like ‘turbo’, ‘stereo’ and ‘hi-fi’. The first one I did was a ‘radar’ robot, which means I built it using only pieces that are shaped like one of the letters of the word: r-a-d-a-r,” he explains of the concept, which also inspired some large wooden sculptures. “I took my own name, Delta, in the 1980s, so the robots made form words were a sort of homage to that.” Having moved on from being Delta, the teen graffiti artist roaming Amsterdam’s abandoned buildings, today Tellegen, now father to a two-year-old son, is one of the counter-cultural success stories of a more approachable Amsterdam. It may be a moneyed European capital these days, but, like Tellegen, it retains its artistic edge.

Stacked and Scattered is at W139 from 1 August [139 Warmoesstraat, Amsterdam, +31 (0)20 622 9434; www.w139.nl]

The catalogue The New Dutch Master – Delta is available for purchase (£45) at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms [135 Flitcroft Street, London, +44 (0)20 7836 6747; www.elmslesters.co.uk]

The secret’s out – today’s top graffiti artists have been embraced by the art cognoscenti, corporate world and wealthy collectors alike. Here is a blagger’s guide to the biggest international urban art stars:

Banksy (UK)
The iconic street artist, born in Bristol in 1975, is now a global celebrity with a best-selling glossy book, Wall And Piece (£20, Century), to his name, while still managing to conceal his true identity.

London’s Islington Council recently sheepishly admitted to carefully retouching Banksy’s work to protect it from the tags of other, lesser graffiti writers.

Since 2004 his stencilbased work has been sold by auction houses and it now fetches prices in the tens of thousands.

New examples of Banksy’s work appear worldwide regularly.

Claw Money (USA)
The New York-based female graffiti writer is among the art form’s most successful. Now nearly 40, on the back of the street cred of her 1990s’ graffiti, she has licensed designs to Nike, Calvin Klein, Marc Ecko (see our business profile, pages 70-72) and Juicy Couture.

“I heard a million graffiti writers say about other girls, ‘Oh, her boyfriend does that,’ but nobody ever said that about me,” she told New York’s Village Voice.

The name Claw is short for Claudia, and a paw-print insignia is her trademark. A photo book of Claw’s work in graffiti and fashion, Bombshell: The Life and Crimes of Claw Money (£20.99, Powerhouse), was released last year.

Blek Le Rat (France)
Before Banksy made his presence felt, there was Blek Le Rat, who pioneered stencil-based graffiti in Paris in 1981 and has frequently used the image of a rat as his calling card, a motif since employed by Banksy whose bronze rat sculpture was auctioned at Sotheby’s.

The controlled approach of Blek Le Rat’s detailed black and white stencils was a deliberate departure from the colourful, anarchic style of the original New York graffiti artists. The book Blek Le Rat: Getting Through The Walls (£11.95, Thames and Hudson) was published this year.