Mushrooms | A Photographic Look at Street Art in Berlin Dror Maayan 6.5.06 - 20.6.06 Dror Maayan went out to wander the streets of Berlin with his camera in search of visual challenges that would serve as fecund soil for a work of art. He found himself walking through the dilapidated but colorful and interesting streets of the east of the city, which contrasted starkly with the "slick", well-kept western part. In the course of his strolls Dror discovered the special graphic art of Berlin. The flaking walls of the eastern city were fruitful ground for unknown artists, who were not content with spraying graffiti and paint blotches, but also made use of stickers and paper cuttings. Some of these graffiti were sprayed with a stencil of a mushroom, and Dror found himself going to look for these mushrooms, locating them, and "picking" them for his needs. Like the mushrooms, the street art of Berlin too springs up overnight, and to enjoy it, it has to be picked quickly, before it loses its zest. Dror described going out to photograph the graffiti as going "to pick mushrooms", fresh after the rain. Every morning Dror went out to shoot pictures, and every morning he found "mushrooms", new and surprising, whose like had not encountered the day before. As he delved deeper and with greater curiosity into the world of the Berlin street artists, he was captivated by their charm and began to document their work. The photos in the exhibition are not pure documentation but works that stand on their own. The artist draws the viewer's attention to an elaborate language, conceptually and aesthetically, but this does not suffice: he detaches the work from its original context and by its means creates a new work of his own. -- Jochai Rosen, Curator