Women are a constantly recurring element in the works of Patrizia Casagranda, whether as a princess, a mythological figure, a rubbish collector or a member of a particular faith. “I think women are great,” the Krefeld artist and mother of three daughters told Pieter Loven, a Jülich gallery owner, in 2018. Initially, Casagranda used themes based on fairy tales, spraying typical accessories such as shoes, horses or frogs over black and white copies. Today, she focuses less on the allegories for society (as fairy tales can also be interpreted) but rather on the great, global themes of our time.

Words, typography in general, structure and color, but also working with concepts play an important role in her work, a fact she herself attributes to her first profession as a designer: “The fact that I love typography is most apparent in the backgrounds of my works.”

Patrizia Casagranda uses a multi-layered grid through which she presses the pattern of different colors with a coarse mesh screen. This unique work has become his defining characteristic. The idea of a piece of “wall on the wall” was born, recycled materials “from the street”, such as truck tarpaulins, pieces of jute, fabric, paper or cardboard, are superimposed under layers of paint, made of a mortar-gypsum mixture enriched with pigments. In the process, Casagranda uses stencils, grids, sprayed and painted areas that alongside and overlay letters or numbers.   Casagranda does not come “from the street”, but she uses the means and the methods of it, and is thus fully registered in the Urban Art.