KILROY WAS HERE
“Kilroy Was Here” originated in World War II, a meme expressed as a graffiti image of a man peeking over a wall, symbolizing the unity of American troops and the connection to their homeland. After the war, Kilroy became a pop culture icon, influencing street art and graffiti.
Mark making on walls precedes civilization and has always been a fundamental aspect of human expression. In the nineteen-seventies in New York, graffiti evolved to transform walls and subways into canvases.
Berlin’s graffiti, both before and after the fall of the Wall, is a powerful blend of political expression and a claim to public space, turning symbols of oppression into platforms for resistance, creativity, and social change. The evolution of graffiti in Berlin reflects the city’s turbulent history and its enduring spirit of defiance and innovation.
Graffiti is inherently political, reacting to unstable conditions and reflecting its environment. Its ephemeral nature today still echoes the transient yet impactful presence of “Kilroy Was Here.”
Introduction
Have you ever come across the iconic graffiti “Kilroy was here”? In this chapter, you will see once again how graffiti and street art are deeply rooted in our culture. “Kilroy was here” exemplifies the historical roots and political impact of this art form. It originated in the Second World War, a meme expressed as a graffiti image of a man peeking over a wall, symbolizing the unity of American troops and the connection to their homeland. After the war, Kilroy became a pop culture icon, influencing street art and graffiti.
Graffiti is not only art, but is also a reflection of social conditions and a means of resistance and unity. Drawing on walls precedes the earliest civilizations; it is an integral part of human expression. Although graffiti sparked off on the East Coast, it developed in New York City into a culture in its own right in the 1970s. Walls and subway cars turned into colorful canvases.
Berlin, too, has a long history of different types of graffiti occupying public space—as a form of artistic expression, but also as a form of protest. The Berlin Wall with its graffiti is a unique example of the power of this art form: a symbol of oppression became a colorful surface giving voice to creativity and resistance. Graffiti is fundamentally political. It reacts to social conditions and elicits a fleeting but instant response in anyone who sees it, as was already the case with the old war graffiti “Kilroy was here.”
Dan Witz
Dan Witz is a street artist and realist painter. His realism is informed by the old masters of Renaissance and Baroque painting. Inspired by subway graffiti and his love of the punk aesthetic, he blends meticulous craftsmanship with urban intervention. His art often incorporates hyper-realistic depictions of everyday life alongside subjects from subcultures such as the hardcore punk scene.
Witz was born in Chicago in 1957 and lives in Brooklyn. As a street art pioneer, he began working in public spaces as early as 1979. One of his first projects was the Birds of Manhattan series, for which he painted hummingbirds of a precise design on the grey walls of the city.
Witz came across the famous graffiti Kilroy Was Here as a child. To this day, he is amazed at “... the idea of drawing a horizontal line that magically creates space and becomes the top of a wall.” In 2006, he began to reinterpret the Kilroy motif, applying photo stickers on street signs or installing rubber gloves on top of walls. In reaction to the accelerated construction of luxury housing in Brooklyn, Witz created a new sub-series of his Kilroy Variations called Ugly New Buildings. It’s easy to see that Witz isn’t a fan of the new architecture: he describes it as sterile and detached from its surroundings—as if huge spaceships had landed overnight. But he finds that the new surfaces and textures at least offer fresh opportunities for his art.
In this exhibition, Dan Witz presents a new work from his Kilroy Variations project. The site-specific work Kill Roy WASSÏERE, specially commissioned for the URBAN NATION, fits unobtrusively into the space.
Kenny Scharf
The painter and multidisciplinary artist Kenny Scharf is the pioneer of pop surrealism. He was born in Los Angeles in 1958 and moved to New York in the late 1970s to attend the School of Visual Arts, where he became roommates with Keith Haring. He soon befriended other artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and found himself in the middle of the 1980s East Village Art movement. Reacting against the commercial art scene, this movement was characterized by its raw, experimental, and often rebellious nature. It was effused with a DIY ethos, with many artists showcasing their work not in commercial galleries but in alternative spaces such as abandoned buildings, clubs, and artist-run galleries, which reflected the neighborhood's gritty, avant-garde spirit.
Scharf’s paintings are inspired by comics, science fiction and TV cartoons. The New York subway graffiti writers fascinated him—the attitude of art created out of pure impulse. Although Scharf does not like the term street art himself, he can be regarded as one of its originators. He became friends with graffiti writers like Daze, whose work can also be seen in this section.
Scharf uses spray paint for his own works on canvas and in public space. His cosmicsurrealistic splashes of color—so-called “blobs”—seemed to enter the cityscape of gloomy New York from another world. Today, among other artworks, Scharf continues to create large-scale murals, which he paints quickly and alone, without assistants.
The work you see here is titled The Blobenstein. It is an example of his characteristic style with bold colors and typical “blob” creatures. Alien, psychedelic, and uncanny elements feed into a vibrant and visually accessible aesthetic—sizzling with the wild energy of the 1980s.
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