the ESSENCE

In 1982 Bill Blast painted the handball court at Rock Steady Park in New York, and those walls went on to inspire a generation of European graffiti writers. A year later he painted on an Amsterdam street. For this show he came back and made a new work inside STRAAT.

Most of the rest comes from the Dutch Graffiti Library, a private collection of more than 15,000 photographs, zines, flyers, sketches and paintings, rooted in the New York, Paris and Netherlands scenes of the 1970s to the 1990s. The show deliberately skips the timeline and doesn't try to cover everything. It sticks to the basics, names, tags, strokes and repetition, and to what they meant for a writer's identity and reputation. You get graffiti's alphabet rather than its history book.

Come for the roots of the 180-odd large works around it. Entry is included in the regular €21.50 ticket, and the museum lists Thursday opening until 21:00. It runs until 30 December.