AGNÈS B. WE LOVE GRAFFITI!!
Exhibition from 27 June to 7 September 2025
“What I believe is important and what I keep repeating is that graffiti is not pollution. On the contrary, it is a rich art. Something that beautifies life, that beautifies the city.” agnès b.
For the past 20 years, the city of Roubaix has become a playground for street artists with graffiti, collages and illegal stencils sweeping across the post-industrial ruins of “the city of a thousand chimneys”.
For its summer programme, La Piscine museum is teaming up with URBX, the urban cultures festival. After exhibiting the works of the American street artist JonOne in 2023 and the photographer Anouk Desury in 2024, agnès b. is taking up her summer quarters at La Piscine for the 2025 event.
The fashion designer, gallery owner, collector, patron and photographer, agnès b. shares with us her pioneering and enlightened devotion to this art whose roots are in the hip-hop culture that emerged at the very beginning of the 80s. Fascinated by Brassaï’s photographs and the graffiti that invaded the city, the New York subway and Paris shortly thereafter, agnès b. was fascinated by this living art and its clandestine mode of expression.
It was only natural that, in 1984, she invited this new artistic scene to display its works in her gallery on the rue du Jour in the heart of the Halles district in Paris. The private viewings came thick and fast, and, in 2001, a manifesto exhibition gathering together 18 artists was held, thereafter establishing graffiti as a recognised artistic discipline. In 2021, La Fab, a display space opened by agnès b. in 2020, held an exhibition dedicated to graffiti in its collection. It was on this occasion that the SUR NOS MURS (on our walls) catalogue by Karim Boukercha and Gautier Bischoff, celebrating 40 years of Graffiti with agnès b., was published by Textuel.
Over the course of her collections, the designer has dedicated a number of themes to this art which is reviving the discipline of painting. She has collaborated with renowned graffiti artists (Bäst, Baudelocque, Dexter Fernandez, Futura, Ikon, JonOne, Katre, Fury, Lek & Sowat, Mambo, Ryan McGinness, etc.). In the museum’s temporary spaces, further match-ups will be presented, with a mix of clothes loaned by the archives of the agnès b. fashion house and original works from the agnès b. collection. A fascinating journey of discovery, with plenty of encounters, shared with us by the woman for whom fashion draws its inspiration from the street.
Curator: agnès b. and Karine Lacquemant, curator of the applied arts collections assisted by Amélie Boron, head of the fashion collection, La Piscine – André Diligent museum of art and industry
The scenography was completed thanks to the generous support of Tollens paint.
Caption: agnès b. Futura dress, summer collection 2015, photography by Jacques Habbah © DR
Preview on Thursday 26 June 2025 from 6pm.
