Overview

Since 1987, Kadir ‘Amigo’ Memiş has been combining dance and calligraphic drawings. When he moved from Anatolia to Berlin in 1984, language was a major obstacle for him, making body language and visual experiences in urban spaces all the more important and meaningful. He consciously chose other means of expression than language and found his calling as a dancer, choreographer, and visual artist through Hip Hop culture.

Since then, Amigo has believed that ‘where my language ends, my dance begins…’ and this also applies to his calligraphic drawings. Because at the same time, he became increasingly interested in tagging, graffiti writing, hand lettering, calligraphy, and drawing in the 1990s. He first drew Latin and Arabic letterforms in black and red with thick markers.

In the 2000s, he experimented with paint rollers and spray cans on walls and floors as part of the Jazz Style Corner collective. These experiences in turn inspired him to create new drawings, which he has continued to develop over the last 20 years, using various techniques on paper and canvas.

Over the past five years, smaller, more fragile, colourful drawings have emerged in sketchbooks. They are more complex, more detailed and characterised by greater spatiality. The calligraphy pen used here creates a jagged script that breaks down letters and bursts the cage of language, as the artist himself describes it. As in a diary, he adds memories in delicate handwriting below, next to or within the drawings. Since Amigo also sees himself as a collector of impressions, mainly from the city – as an urban nomad – who, through dance and drawing, functions as a vertical human being between heaven and earth.

In the 2000s, he experimented with paint rollers and spray cans on walls and floors as part of the Jazz Style Corner collective. These experiences in turn inspired him to create new drawings, which he has continued to develop over the last 20 years, using various techniques on paper and canvas. Over the past five years, smaller, more fragile, colourful drawings have emerged in sketchbooks. They are more complex, more detailed and characterised by greater spatiality. The calligraphy pen used here creates a jagged script that breaks down letters and bursts the cage of language, as the artist himself describes it. As in a diary, he adds memories in delicate handwriting below, next to or within the drawings. Since Amigo also sees himself as a collector of impressions, mainly from the city – as an urban nomad – who, through dance and drawing, functions as a vertical human being between heaven and earth.

Amigo’s drawings are generally characterised by writing, inspired by Arabic and Asian calligraphy, especially from Japan. Like dance movements, his drawn lines always follow intuition with practiced gestures. Inspired by Arabic, Asian and Latin writing styles, his drawings sometimes run from left to right, sometimes from right to left or from bottom to top. The interwoven patterns and shapes created by the finely drawn lines seem to dance, turn, move or even merge into vertical silhouettes of figures – like female dancers, because for Amigo, the city is feminine.

Working with verticality, his forms stand between the ground and the sky, like a standing human being as a link between two spheres. With spontaneity, dynamism and masterful gestures, Amigo works with the factor of space, and always against the factor of time: ‘Quickly – without thinking – for dynamism – under pressure – under pressure – like on the street. Only in this way is the mind free and allows the stroke to be guided by feeling and intuition. Because reflection can inhibit.‘

In Amigo’s works, the large dot appears again and again, the filled circle, like a ball, a striking final point added at the end. Like a fiery sun in red-orange, like henna, or like a silver moon, the symbol of the sphere, of the supernatural, floats next to the calligraphic compositions and transforms his images into something landscape-like and heavenly through celestial metamorphosis.

Text by Katia Hermann