Rammellzee: Gothic Futurism
November 5, 2022–January 14, 2023
The immersive world of the polyhedric graffiti writer, visual artist, musician, lyricist, performer, fashion designer, innovator and philosopher Rammellzee lands in Los Angeles this November. The exhibition surveys his oeuvre from his graffiti beginnings on the A train in the mid-1970s to his fine arts and performance practice developed over the following three decades.
A true iconoclast, Rammellzee committed to his thinking and art-making with an approach that was simultaneously programmatic and shamanic. His esoteric manifestos encompassed philology and astrophysics and drew inspiration from contemporary sensibility and medieval history alike. One of Rammellzee’s obsessions was a story about medieval monks who developed lettering so ornate to be deemed unreadable by the higher ranks of the clergy and eventually got banned. In his vision, this story was proof of the subversive, anti-establishment potential of lettering. It illuminated the path similarly undertaken by graffiti artists, who by rendering a name mysterious and unrecognizable, could liberate language from its intrinsic power structures. This was the birth of Rammellzee’s philosophy, “Gothic Futurism,” and the artistic approach known as “Ikonoklast Panzerism.”
More at:
https://deitch.com/los-angeles/exhibitions/rammellzee-gothic-futurism