Delta force
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 [...]
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.
alt="A large-scale wooden robot sculpture by Tellegen Opposite: Diversions In White, 2008">
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.”
alt="Graffiti meets graphic design in an Amsterdam tunnel">
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.”
alt="100 North, 2008">
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.”
alt="Tellegen’s work brightens up the Jan Cunen Museum, in Oss, The Netherlands, in 2005">
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.”
alt="Tellegen’s work De Steile Wand, 2007, shows how galleries are fully supporting street art">
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.
