Jan Kaláb

The “S” Wall

This wall was one of the first hall of fames at the beginning of the 90’s in Praha. It is very unique since it is in the shape of an “S” – it sits on a small hill, very low on the left, then quite high on the right. Standing by the wall you don’t see all of it since it is curved. I don’t think it’s an ideal wall for classic graffiti, but it is a very challenging wall to paint it as a whole art piece, which I was able to do several times.

The Wailing Wall by Petr Volf

Těšnov is one of the cult graffiti locations in Prague. Tram lines wind past a wall on the boundary between Nové Město (New City) and the Karlín quarter, and until 1985 a Jugendstil train station was located there, which was nonsensically levelled to the ground by the Communists. It is a place with a damaged memory, given an original identity by graffiti artists headed by the groundbreaking TCP Crew. In view of the thirty-meter length of the wall and its curvature, which means it cannot be seen in its entirety, only experienced writers capable of handling large formats as a single whole could venture to paint it. Jan Kaláb worked in Těšnov for the first time in 1999 and step by step he made it his preserve. His graffiti transformed in line with an emphasis on content and personal communications of varying lengths. He used the wall as a space to make commentaries on intimate and social issues, beginning to express himself as a writer in the true sense of the word. One could look at it as a post-modern, Central European, supremely local variation of the Wailing Wall. In 2001, he came up with the composition Město (The City), where he highlighted the repressive campaign against graffiti in Prague which became almost hysterical at the beginning of the new millennium, amply bolstered by the media. Two years later he dedicated the entire wall to his late father Jan Kaláb whose golden portrait became the main motif of the work, together with the genuine self-reflexive words of a son (“I remember who I used to turn to with my questions, who helped me when I got into deep shit…”) In 2007, he posed questions to the future inhabitants of planet Earth in 2222. He was interested whether by then all the icebergs had melted, because “the ozone hole is already big”, adding in conclusion: “I did what I enjoyed, I painted what I wanted… and I was happy. Do you get it? ” Whenever he worked in Těšnov, he had to have a deep reason for it. Passersby read his messages carefully, some would actually deliberately get off the tram to do so.