In the beginning, before street art was even invented, Hugo Kaagman was getting up on the streets and walls of Europe. His work is the living embodiment of the collision between punk and art and resistance. I wish more artists had more of Hugo’s energy and less of their own pretension. Forget all you know about Blek, Banksy and Obey, as Hugo has been doing this shit (and getting it right) since before you were born. Long live the erstwhile, rightful ruler. He was born in the suburb of Haarlem in 1955, 10 miles from Amsterdam. His father worked with the national telephone company and he didn’t allow him to go to an Art Academy. ‘Because that was no job, he said. I was always drawing, preferably with East Indian ink. When I was fourteen I started hitchhiking and bought my first heavy-duty markers to write the text of my destination on paper. Then I also started leaving tags on traffic signs, as it was nice to see it the next time I passed.

  In 1977 I squatted a house in the centre of Amsterdam with ten other people. We started a punk fanzine inspired by the British fanzine Sniffing Glue. To get a response we began to write and spray on the walls. At the end of 1977 there was a protest manifestation at the opening of the new metro that was running beside our squatted house. There I saw the first stencil sprayed, a protest text: “Metro = Geldriool” [metro = sewer], in fat, stencil-bold font. ‘Spraying freehand was frustrating most of the time, because I couldn’t get the effect I wanted. So, a few months later I cut my first stencils: one of Johnny Rotten and one of Bob Marley. Our fanzine was a photocopy magazine, the same time I blew up the images with Xerox to cut them out and spray around. In 1978 we started a shop called Gallery ANUS to sell our magazines and that of others.

King Adz                    Page 140 - 141

The launch in the V Hotel, Amsterdam, november 2010