Klaus Dauven (1966, DE) makes ‘reverse graffiti’. This is the name for the creative process in which Dauven uses a high-pressure water gun to partly remove dirt from the walls of concrete buildings or dams and create drawings that arise from the contrast between the clean and dirty parts of the wall. He primarily uses stencils in the shape of plants and animals, letting nature take over man-made structures, as it were.

Working from the same principle – removing in order to create an image – he also makes man-sized charcoal drawings. After colouring an entire surface area black, he uses a powerful vacuum cleaner with special attachments to partly suck away the charcoal, thereby creating architectonic forms. Dauven also works on a much smaller scale, using dirty cleaning rags as his ‘canvases’. The tension between nature and man is also evident in these smaller works.