Estate Living Digital Publication Issue 3 March 2015 | Page 49

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Andrzej Urbanski’s
Digital Formalism

We start our conversation about the
changing quality of Montana spray
paints. Urbanski has an impressive
collection, arranged in colours upon
racks on the far studio wall. He brings
out a can from the ’90s with a design
I’m familiar with from my days as
a toy in the local graffiti scene. It is
these older cans that he holds fondly
in his hands, commenting on how
good their gloss is compared to the
newer Montana cans. They are also
faster, meaning he could throwup or
backjump a train really quickly as the
can speed forced him to write faster.
Having left his days of full-time train
bombing back in Berlin where he
started writing in his teens, Urbanski
now experiments with the Montana
artist’s brand and a variety of adhesive
tapes. He creates large, shimmering,
optically bending spaces composed
from the architectural squares,

triangles and hexagons of today’s
contemporary built environment.
The street runs deeply in his blood.
The many years as an undergraduate
communication and design student in
the very newly de-walled Berlin was a
time of full-time devotion to graffiti.
His double life, as he calls it, where
he would snatch three hours of sleep
between night-time excursions to train
yards and the daylight task of attending
the local technicon.
It was only after he had converted
his undergraduate diploma into a
degree and set off to accept an offer
at the coveted University for Art and
Design in Lausanne, Switzerland, that
Urbanski left his addictive double life
behind to pursue a more traditional
form of painting full-time. He has
always loved the great master painters,
unpacking their tenuous mythological

status through the lens of a feminist
art history teacher at school. It was
perhaps this love of the painting –
that wry, deceptively simple object of
so much Western art culture – that
brought him back to the canvas after a
few years as a photographer.
The works you see before you today
are a culmination of that biography, a
testament to the German philosopher
and art historian, Wilhelm Worringer’s
assertion that abstract art is not a
withdrawal from the world, but a direct
engagement with it. I cite Worringer’s
1908 book, Abstraction and Empathy,
here because of the philosopher’s
timeless observation that to tend to
pure abstraction is a primordial instinct
and the only possibility of peace in
a world so saturated by imagery.
Worringer’s words echo through
art history to Urbanski’s canvases