WOW123 – INNER CONFLICT

Markus Genesius, born in Bremen in 1974, is one of the important representatives of the second generation of the German graffiti and street art scene. After many years of worldwide activity under the alias WOW123, he shifted his focus towards contemporary art some time ago, without losing sight of his original roots. His path led him from the classic style writing of graffiti design to a stylistic development and his own new artistic language, with which he entered a different environment, that of traditional visual art.

Markus Genesius moves between urban art and the classical art scene and works in both fields in parallel. In his canvases he works on a mixture of constructive concepts and free, intuitive, gestural painting in the tradition of the Informel or the Abstract Expressionism of the 50s. In doing so, he creates dynamic, moving pictures in strong colors on the one hand and abstract compositions of minimalist appearance, compact free-standing figures or free geometric constructions of controlled dynamics, which are completely removed from these.

This book is the first retrospective overview to document the development of Markus Genesius both in the field of graffiti and urban art as well as the classical art business from its beginnings to the present day in many illustrations and to illuminate his work from various perspectives in texts by Ingo Clauß, Albert Darboven, Katharina Galladé, Ingmar Lähnemann, Rainer B. Schossig, Katerina Vatsella, Tat`s Crew NYC and Samy Deluxe.