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Draft:Willem Speerstra

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Willem Speerstra
Born1972
OccupationDutch gallery owner

Willem Speerstra, born in 1972 in Amsterdam, is a Dutch gallery owner and contemporary art collector. He advocates for artists from the graffiti and post-graffiti movements..[1].

Biography

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Willem Speerstra was born in 1972. His passion for graffiti began with the arrival of the movement in Europe from the United States in the early 1980s. From the early 1980s, his father, a collector and gallery owner, purchased his first graffiti artworks. As a teenager, Speerstra deepened his knowledge of the culture and the scene by engaging with artists and collectors. Between 1990 and 1995, his frequent visits to the "Hôpital Éphémère" in Paris reinforced his commitment to the graffiti movement[2][3][4].

A dedicated collector with initial experience at the Michel Gillet Gallery, he opened the first gallery in France specializing in graffiti art, the Speerstra Gallery, in October 2001, located in the heart of Paris's Marais district at 4/6 Rue du Perche. From the first exhibitions (Daze, February 2002), Speerstra introduced the public to the work of American graffiti pioneers like John Matos Crash, John Jonone Perello, Sharp, Blade, Chris Daze Ellis, as well as photographers who documented that era, such as Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper. He also focused on discovering new talents and supporting a generation of artists who grew up with this culture, such as Dare, Sozyone, Honet, Mist, Tilt, RCF1, Smash137, while also embracing contemporary art with artists like Thierry Furger, Thomas Fiebig, Nicolas Beaud, Annina Roescheisen, MPCEM, Nicolas Bamert (L'Original), and Mina Hamada[5][6].

By giving these artists their first exposure in France, Willem Speerstra contributed to the historical, aesthetic, and commercial recognition of the graffiti movement as a whole. Since 2007, the Speerstra Gallery has been located in Bursins in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, where it continues to support international artists. For Speerstra, it is essential through his exhibitions to provide the public with the best understanding of the various definitions and styles of art. In December 2008, he opened a second space in Geneva, with Alexöne as the first artist to exhibit there[7][8][9][10][11].

In September 2011, Willem Speerstra led a discussion on the graffiti movement after the screening of the cult film Style Wars during the Rock'n'Wall festival held at Fri-Son, a self-managed cultural space in Fribourg, Switzerland.

In April 2016, Speerstra presented a series of three conferences on Street Art: From Graffiti to Urban Art at the Société de Lecture in Geneva, organized by the Cercle Menus Plaisir as part of the Les Clés de l'Art et de la Collection program.

In December 2016, he was invited as a graffiti specialist to the Rendez-Vous d'Artistes, a series of thematic visits and exchanges between artists, speakers, and the public, organized at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire in Geneva. Exchange and dialogue are crucial for Speerstra, who frequently organizes meetings between artists, students, and professors in his gallery, such as during the "Variations" exhibition by artist Alex Kuznetsov in March 2018.

The Speerstra Gallery also participated in the Art Paris Art Fair under the glass roof of the Grand Palais in Paris for two consecutive years (2016 and 2017), where Speerstra was a passionate advocate for graffiti artists within the contemporary art world.

In September 2017, Willem Speerstra returned to Paris, opening a new annex of the Swiss gallery in the Haut-Marais district at 24 Rue Saint-Claude, focusing on pioneers of post-graffiti, both American and European[12]

From 2017 to 2019, Speerstra co-organized the Urban Painting Around The World event, held over a weekend in Monaco, featuring live paintings along the port and followed by an auction benefiting the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation. Speerstra's role included selecting the most representative international graffiti artists.

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The Speerstra Collection

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Begun in 1978, the Speerstra collection is one of the most important in the world, featuring works by leading post-graffiti artists from the late 1970s to today. Works from this collection have been featured in the most influential exhibitions dedicated to the movement:

  • "Graffiti," 1983, Boymans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands.
  • "Graffiti," 1984, Groningen Museum, Netherlands.
  • "New-York Graffiti," 1984, Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, Denmark.
  • "Rammellzee," 1987, Gemeente Museum, Helmond, Netherlands, then at Groningen Museum, Netherlands.
  • "Graffiti Art," 1991, Museum of French Monuments, Paris, France.
  • "Coming from the Subway," 1992/1993, Groningen Museum, Netherlands.
  • "Crash & Daze," 1999/2000, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice, France.
  • "Graffiti Stories," 2007, Abbey of Auberive and Paul Valéry Museum, Sète, France.
  • "L'art Modeste sous les bombes," 2007, International Museum of Modest Arts, Sète, France.
  • "In the Beginning," 2013, Spacejunk spaces in Bayonne, Lyon, and Grenoble, France.
  • "#Street-Art, Innovation at the Heart of the Movement," 2014, EDF Foundation, Paris, France.
  • "La Velocità delle immagini," 2016, Swiss Institute, Rome, Italy.
  • "Libres Figurations - Années 80," 2017/2018, Hélène & Édouard Leclerc Fund, Landerneau, France.
  • "Fire on Fire" Speerstra Collection @ Fine Arts Museum of Nancy, France, October 2019.
  • "Sneaker Collab" Futura 2000, October 2019, MUDAC Museum, Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Speerstra collection @ Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA, October 2020, "Writing the Future" Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation.
  • "One, Two… Street Art!" September 2020, Espace Quartier Libre SIG, Pont de la Machine 1, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland.
  • JonOne, Free Spirit exhibition, Institut Bernard Magrez, Bordeaux, France. 2021 - Speerstra Collection.
  • Speerstra Collection @ Fine Arts Museum of Calais / France, June 2021, "LIBRES FIGURATIONS - ANNÉES 80."
  • "BASQUIAT x WARHOL" Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, April - August 2023 - collaborative work by A One - CRASH - DAZE, 1984 - Speerstra Collection.
  • Speerstra Collection @ Palais de Tokyo, Paris, June 2023, exhibition "La morsure des termites."

The Speerstra Foundation

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Between 2012 and 2015, the Speerstra family exhibited part of their collection at their foundation dedicated to art in Switzerland. With over a thousand works, the collection spans the old-school periods to the present day. The exhibition space, covering more than 1500 square meters, gathered numerous key artists from the post-graffiti movement: Crash, Daze, Sharp, Rammellzee, Dondi White, Futura2000, A-One, Quik, Lady Pink, JonOne, Seen... The exhibition center of the Foundation, located in Apples, closed in 2015 due to lack of expected success.

The Speerstra Foundation also hosted temporary exhibitions more focused on multidisciplinary contemporary art (Philip King, 2012; Dan Walsh, 2013; Keiichi Tanaami, 2013...), thereby fostering dialogue and bridges between the two worlds[14]

References

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  1. ^ "Nouvo - Le Street Art: entre underground et mondanité - Play RTS" – via www.rts.ch.
  2. ^ "À propos". Speerstra Gallery / Post Graffiti and Contemporary Art.
  3. ^ "Fichier PDF file_2_graffiti-art-willem-2009004.pdf". Fichier PDF.
  4. ^ "Fichier PDF Artpassions n°41 (1).pdf". Fichier PDF.
  5. ^ "Fichier PDF l'écho speerstra.pdf". Fichier PDF.
  6. ^ "Des tagueurs très recherchés". L'Express. September 5, 2004.
  7. ^ "Graffiti / Street Art / Post-Graffiti en France, de 1980 à 2013 : État des lieux. by Sabella - Issuu". issuu.com. May 21, 2014.
  8. ^ "Speerstra Gallery | Cnap". www.cnap.fr.
  9. ^ "Fichier PDF la cote speerstra.pdf". Fichier PDF.
  10. ^ "ART O'BAZ du 11 décembre 2014 - Nyon Region Télévision | NRTV". December 11, 2014.
  11. ^ "Fichier PDF alexone enfgraffiti art 001.pdf". Fichier PDF.
  12. ^ "Le Post Graffiti, qu'est ce que c'est ?". November 26, 2017 – via YouTube.
  13. ^ "Fichier PDF smash137graffiti art mag 2010.pdf". Fichier PDF.
  14. ^ "Le post-graffiti n'a pas séduit la campagne". 24 heures. April 5, 2016.
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