Street artist deletes his mural in protest: Displayed without consent in paid exhibition

The Facebook page of Spanish street artist Gonzalo Borondo reads in a post, “Several years ago several murals were detached from their original context without the consent of any of the authors. In addition, these stolen murals were displayed in paid exhibitions, also without permission from the artists. A few weeks ago, I discovered that some of these works were being sold online, and that my name was written under some of the works that were not done by me. Initially, the art restorer who removed them admitted to the looting, apologizing by saying that he only intended to preserve the murals but did not want to sell the works. I also found out that some of these works could be seen in a paid exhibition, and these are the consequences. These works in public spaces were not created with the intention of turning them into objects for consumption, but with the desire to make them dialogue with the space. Without their context they lose their meaning, the artist’s vision disappears from the work, and finally the whole artwork vanishes. As they say: create to destroy, destroy to create.”

In the face of this, a man entered the Colosseum theater in Turin and erased, at Borondo’s own behest, a mural by the Spanish artist, covering it with white spray paint. The erasure was claimed by Borondo, but it is not known the man who carried out the act was the artist himself. According to Borondo’s claim, the mural depicting a woman and a man sitting at a table had been detached without consent from the wall on which it was made (on an abandoned barracks in Bologna between 2005 and 2007) and displayed at the Street Art in Blue 3 exhibition: a roundup of artwork made by the world’s best-known street artists, including Banksy.

“More than a defense of that precise work, the gesture was a stance against the practice of ’ripping’ works off walls and displaying them without consent in paid exhibitions,” Borondo says.

Street artist deletes his mural in protest: Displayed without consent in paid exhibition

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