Julien Marmar

Description

Julien Calemard, who works under the alias Marmar, came of age between the graffiti yards of the Paris suburbs and the studios of the École des Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg. As a student, he kept the two worlds apart: an artist by day, a graffiti writer by night. In his own words, he is now “an artist who practises graffiti”: a phrase that signals the maturity of a new generation that no longer subordinates graffiti to contemporary art, but understands it as an autonomous practice with its own history and rules. Marmar’s distinctive vocabulary was developed through drawing on paper, executed with the cheap felt-tip markers that children use for colouring. In this piece, that intimate visual register is echoed at large scale in spray paint. The figures that typically populate his images translate the imagery of an industrial age into a colourful, tongue-in-cheek and unmistakably naïve idiom. For the Urban Art Biennale 2026, Marmar’s painted figures inhabit the Ironworks alongside the surviving evidence of the labour they evoke.