No More Crew: Jan Kaláb / Pasta Oner / Michal Škapa

About

"No More Crew" is not a crew, but 3 artist friends, whose friendship has been rooted in graffiti at an early age in the streets of Prague after the fall of the Iron Curtain and later worldwide. Cakes/Point (Jan Kaláb), Tron (Michal Škapa) and Pasta Oner are graffiti heroes and teenage friends but their artist trajectories have been maturing and, while the firendship remains strong, their styles and achievements have been separate, although in a complementary way.

Today, we are proud to present in Berlin their latest bodies of works in a 3-figurehead solo show.

With the soul of an architect, Jan Kaláb easily conquers the third dimension not only in his murals, but also in his canvases. He has grown to embrace the painter within, and although his forte is the creation of objects he has been chiseling away at geometric abstraction, discovering spaces interior and without, regardless of the clichéd expression “that’s been done.”

The same could be said of PASTA ONER. It is possible to cite the clearly visible sources of inspiration, identify the specific paraphrases. Yet one must also take into account the force and accuracy with which he mirrors the conservative Central European mindset. How spot-on is his commentary on the bad habits of consumerism, or the directness with which he tackles the large format through his short post-pop messages.

Michal Škapa, by contrast, works with the moment of replication, the multiplication of a graphic element, with a hand patently the descendant of an expert graffiti artist. His style is ornamental, rhythmic, abstract and concrete at the same time. He is the draughtsman of his canvases, the transmitter of symbols, creator of expansive mural-format comics with unsettling subject matter.

The exhibition No More Crew at Urban Spree Galerie presents a trio of disparate and yet splendidly and mutually complementary artists. Their work defies being simply the result of the overused epithet “drawing on street art”, and at the same time any confrontation with their work requires such a label. Space, place, city, symbol, sign. Something for everybody.