What the fuck? Shoe at STRAAT
About the Exhibition
Dutch urban arts legend Niels “Shoe” Meulman, founder of Calligraffiti, inaugurated the STRAAT Gallery, the museum’s in-house gallery, with his solo exhibition and installation, What The Fuck? – Shoe at STRAAT. The exhibition presented 35 works spanning four decades, tracing Shoe’s prolific career from pioneering graffiti pieces to recent abstract and action painting gallery works.
“‘What the fuck?’ best describes the human condition, now and always,” says Shoe. “Cavepersons had many questions, and so will spacepersons. But the one question that reigns supreme is, ‘What the fuck?’”
The exhibition took place in the museum’s second floor mezzanine gallery, with the opening reception as a VIP, invite-only RSVP event. Small guided tours of STRAAT’s street art collection were offered alongside a live DJ and light catering.
Installation: Shoe in the Middle
Concurrent with the gallery show, Shoe presented Shoe in the Middle on the ground floor of STRAAT. This immersive installation continued themes from his earlier series, Unidenticals and Unambidextrous, and included:
Murals painted with fire extinguishers
Larger Scale curtain paintings
A painted wall constructed from 3,000 copies of Shoe’s 300-page monograph, Shoe Is My Middle Name
Shoe describes the concept: “We all have two eyes, two hands, two feet, and two shoes, but there is also a shoe in the middle, and that’s me. I always end up in the middle, between graffiti and street art, and the elite art world and the lowbrow art world. I find myself bridging all these worlds, and I actually see that as part of my job.”
Special Edition
As part of the exhibition, Shoe and STRAAT released a limited edition screen print titled The Difference, featuring an ambigram of graffiti lettering executed in street art stencil technique.
About Niels Shoe Meulman: An Innovator in Graffiti
Niels “Shoe” Meulman is an established Dutch visual artist, known for his gestural paintings that reveal vivid traces of graffiti and calligraphy. He revolutionized the art of writing when he initiated the Calligraffiti movement, famously stating, “A word is an image and writing is painting.”
A graffiti pioneer from Amsterdam, Shoe tagged alongside New York legends such as Dondi White, Rammellzee, and Keith Haring in the 1980s. Equally influenced by the great painters of Abstract Expressionism, he gradually developed his own way of translating street attitude onto gallery walls. Constantly experimenting with paint-on-canvas, while also venturing into conceptual installations and poetry, Niels “Shoe” Meulman continues to push the boundaries of Urban Contemporary art.
Exhibition Info
Public viewing: October 17 – December 13, 2020
Location: STRAAT Museum, Amsterdam
Hours: Tuesday – Sunday 10:00 – 18:00, extended Friday hours until 21:00
Admission: Included with regular museum entry
A digital catalogue of exhibition works was made available in advance, with gallery works for sale via straatgallery.com. Physical copies of the catalogue were also sold through the museum shop and as part of a ticket-and-book package via straatmuseum.com.
The exhibition was co-curated by Shoe and Hyland Mather, STRAAT exhibitions curator.
Click here to download the exhibition catalog.