Casagranda found her way to painting through history or rather Roman history: "After all, the paintings in Pompeii can be described as street art of antiquity. I was fascinated by the ageing process of these paintings and transferred them to our time, utilising my own technique."
A R T A S I F F R O M T H E S T R E E T
ABOUT THE WORKS OF PATRIZIA CASAGRANDA
Women are a constantly recurring element in the works of Patrizia Casagranda, whether as a princess, a mythological figure, a rubbish collector or a member of a particular faith. "I think women are great," the Krefeld artist and mother of three daughters told Pieter Loven, a Jülich gallery owner, in 2018. Initially, Casagranda used themes based on fairy tales, spraying typical accessories such as shoes, horses or frogs over black and white copies. Today, she focuses less on the allegories for society (as fairy tales can also be interpreted) but rather on the great, global themes of our time. Equality, justice and tolerance can be seen as demands resulting from her examination of the Indian rubbish girls from the Kalbelia caste. These fundamental values can also be found in her series Belief, which is about world religions. Patrizia Casagranda has only been working as a freelance artist since 2016. Since then, her work has been accompanied by great success.Previously, she had completed her design studies, focusing on illustration, with distinction in 2002 and subsequently worked as a graphic designer for Günther Uecker and Markus Lüpertz, among others. Words, typography in general, structure and colourfulness, but also working in concepts play a significant role in her artworks, a fact she herself attributes to her first profession as a designer: "The fact that I enjoy typography can be seen above all in the backgrounds of my works."
Whereas Patrizia Casagranda initially worked with acrylic and made collages, in the meantime, the multi-layered grid through which she presses the motif in different colours utilising a coarse-meshed screen has become her distinctive feature. At the invitation of Peter Wilms, with whom she has shared a studio in Holland for 20 years, she travelled to India. There, she met the rubbish girls from the Indian snake caste, the Kabelia, who gave her their rubbish finds, which she, in turn, used, literally, as the basis of her works. The idea of a piece of "wall on the wall" was born, the recycled materials "from the street", such
as truck tarpaulins, pieces of jute, fabric, paper or cardboard, are overlaid with "15 to 20, sometimes more" layers of painting, consisting of a mortar-gypsum mixture enriched with pigments. In the process, Casagranda makes use of the artistic range that graffiti has to offer. Stencils, grids, sprayed and painted areas are found next to and on top of each other, also in combination with type fragments that she takes from different contexts. These can be a poem or Charlie Chaplin's speech from the film The Great Dictator. While not originating from this scene, Casagranda's use of graffiti techniques demonstrates how this artistic counter-movement has managed to reach the art world's mainstream. Banksy is not the only example of the museum-accessible nature of this young art movement. Casagranda's way of working also proves that the transitions are fluid and that the viewer has become accustomed to the "used" character of artworks. Casagranda does not come "from the street", but she uses its means and methods, which is why she can most certainly be attributed to Urban Art.