rebel artists - I met Banksy / CASAGRANDA patrizia (Urban Art)

CASAGRANDA patrizia - Unconventional, sustainable, massive and graceful

The artist's works are made from adventurous materials: recycled army tents, cardboard boxes, jute sacks and lorry tarpaulins. Mortar mixtures mixed with colour pigment are applied in ten or more layers until massive surface reliefs are created: this is urban art or, in material terms, upcycling art. The elaborate material pictures, reliefs, almost sculptures, show portraits of women as icons of art history, or depict them as zeitgeist idols, fairytale princesses or as small, perhaps even great heroines of everyday life.

Patrizia Casagranda combines materials and motifs to make a variety of statements; on sustainability, diversity, beauty and also their dissolution.

The canon of values of world religions, social implications and being a woman in cultural contexts are addressed directly, but without pointing a finger, in order to have an open and free effect on the viewer. Patricia Casagranda brings street art into rooms, puts a piece of wall on the walls and tells of justice, equality and tolerance in loud, bright, signal colours. This places Patrizia Casagranda's work aesthetically and thematically in line with urban art artists who publicly engage in a provocative and poetic dialogue with the public - as does the most popular of them all: Banksy.

The show rebel artists - I met Banksy at the FLOX gallery in Dresden refers to the exhibition ‘BANKSY & FRIENDS. Storie di Artisti ribelli’, which opened at the Museo Promitrice Turin in November 2024. Twenty artists, including Takashi Muramaki, Liu Bolin, Damien Hirst, David LaChapelle and Patrizia Casagranda, were invited to join Banksy in expressing their experience of the world, their discomfort, their indignation and inspiration - quite simply: their observations - each in their own visual and symbolic language. After Turin, the latest works will be on show at FLOX in Dresden, immediately afterwards. It is typical of stree art artists to always keep up, to react, to live the zeitgeist.

The fact that a Madonna (Mutterliebe 2023) is the title of the show in Dresden is a good idea, as images of the Virgin Mary have always been and remained controversial over the centuries: as an image, model, distorted image, archetype, enemy image, image of beauty - as an image of women.

(Author: Excerpts from texts by Dr Tina Simon, publicist, Leipzig, 2025)