Duo Show “End of July” / DAFNE Tree & Howtokillagraffiti
ReTramp Gallery presents:
End of July
Duo-Show DAFNE Tree // Howtokillagraffiti
Curated by Katia Hermann.
31.07.2026 – 2.08.2026
Opening, Friday 31. July 2026, 5 pm to 10 pm
Open Saturday and Sunday from 3 pm to 7 pm
At the end of July, time suffers a slight sunstroke. The calendar begins to run backwards, the clocks forget their hands, and the walls wonder whether they ever actually wanted to be walls in the first place. Summer stands still, but only briefly – just long enough for a shadow to open a duo exhibition at the Retramp Gallery. Here, two painting machines come together, building new forms from the ruins of clearness: DAFNE Tree and Howtokillagraffiti.
The Spanish artist DAFNE Tree, based in Berlin, explores the things that are left behind. Houses, walls and landscapes become dormant archives in which concrete dreams of bodies long gone and ruins secretly write their own biographies. In her drawings, acrylics and oil paintings, pictorial spaces emerge in which decay, memory and renewal merge. Places become archives of human intervention and testimonies to constant change. Architecture becomes landscape, landscape becomes memory, memory becomes colour. Her pictures resemble archaeological expeditions into a future that has forgotten it has not yet actually taken place.
The Berlin-based artist Howtokillagraffiti takes the sign to court: the letter is interrogated, the tag loses its identity, the signature is arrested and is released again as a painting. What was once a quick mark on a wall mutates into a living organism – half memory, half creature of the future. Howtokillagraffiti subjects graffiti writing – as an urban system of identity and marking – to a process of deconstruction within post-sumerism. Letters are fragmented, overwritten and transformed into a painterly structure in which destruction and reformation are inextricably linked. Graffiti loses its identity, becoming a creature, a spirit, a painterly accident in the form of ‘Graff-malerei’. Perhaps this is where his graffiti dies – or perhaps it is simply celebrating its rebirth with a party that’s far too big.
DAFNE Tree and Howtokillagraffiti are linked not only by the murals they have created together and the immediate proximity of their studios, but above all by a shared understanding of painting as an ongoing process of transformation. For both artistic practices, with their distinct visual languages, explore states of transition: what remains when existing orders lose their stability? What forms emerge from the process of dissolution? What images arise when identities, spaces and meanings are set in motion?
End of July operates precisely in this interstitial space – between wall and world, city and dream, the last day of July and a morning whose language has yet to be invented.
Dadapromps by AI – fed with texts from the internet, including those by Katia Hermann
About the artists
DAFNE Tree (born in 1988 in Andalusia, Spain) lives and works in Berlin. Before studying art at the University of Fine Arts in Seville until 2013, she was already involved in graffiti culture and actively painted in both rural and urban settings. Her abstract-figurative paintings and drawings, characterised by bold brushstrokes in acrylic or oil on walls, canvas and paper, draw inspiration from landscape, caves, archaeology, brutalist architecture and forms found in graffiti. A central theme of her work is her exploration of peripheral spaces, abandoned buildings and the traces of social change. She describes her works as a dialogue between architecture and painting, focusing on collective memory, loss of identity, depopulation and urban transformation.
https://www.instagram.com/dafnetree/?hl=de
https://www.urbanspree.com/galerie/artists/dafne-tree.html
Howtokillagraffiti (DE), born in Berlin in 1987. Aerosol/graffiti artist and freelance painter since 1999/2000. He devoted seven years to oil painting in the artists’ village of Songzhuang in China before moving back to Berlin in 2019. On the wall, he paints freely and intuitively; here, his creative process draws on the freestyle techniques of graffiti writing as well as the action painting of Abstract Expressionism, and he works with wall paint and spray paint to combine abstraction, figuration and writing. Letters from his former writer names, such as SUMER, are hidden in almost all his expressive works, whether on walls or canvas – here using oil paint, charcoal and spray paint. The very substance of the paint itself and the partly surrealist, fantastical figuration have killed off, blown apart, absorbed or overshadowed his letters; the artist thus shows us visually ‘how to kill a graffiti’ – a name that simultaneously serves as a kind of manifesto.