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AKTE ONE
Mark Marquardt

Contemporary Urban Art

1978 – born in Berlin (Eastside)
1986 – relocation to West Germany (Augsburg) with parents
1989 – re-relocation to Berlin (Lichterfelde, then Neukölln)
1996 – 1999 – training and qualification as Sign and Neon Advertising Sign Maker
2000 – continuing education studies as Web Designer (Multi Media)
1991 – start with graffiti design
1998 – first recordings as rapper/musician/songwriter
2008 – start of work as Graffiti-Coach e.g. at schools in Berlin
2009 – first work on canvas/paper and with Mixed Media
2012 – birth of his son Bruno Marquardt
2016 – start to work with Cren


Graffiti Art by Akte One – „Moving out“

Akte one has become one of the most established representatives of the graffiti scene. Like many young people, his artistic career has been formed by the quest for an own identity.
Induced by the relocation from East Berlin to West Germany, and further frequent relocations and continuously changing surroundings, these questions began to increasingly matter to him: “To what and where do I belong? Who accepts me?”
When the answers to these questions are missing, many young people become disoriented.


In 1991, when Akte joined his first graffiti gang, he finally experienced the acceptance as a personality he had been looking for, and also the group´s protection.
Gradually, he discovered a world that at first was mysterious and secretive to him, the world of his own pictures and tags that has been holding him in its spell until today. Akte painted on walls and other media in the capital and learned that he was respected for it.


This is an experience that he shares with many Urban Art artists. These experiences of the graffiti scene have now been discovered by schools as a pedagogical field of activity and are used as self-discovery programmes for their pupils.


In his works, the skilled sign and neon advertising sign maker draws parallels to typography and develops these further according to his ideas. He is not satisfied with normality, with what he has achieved. There is also a distinctive quality perception.


The urge to break out and to find new ways and possibilities of expressing oneself has made Akte turn from the “wall“ also to canvas.


His mostly small-size canvas picures are characterized by the experience with his classic graffiti style, on the other hand he boldy experiments. In my view, this can be seen particularly well in his contract work pictures, where he has to deal with the clients´ wishes and ideas, but also tackles his own ideas and does not deny them. He is well up to these challenges, he is developing his artistic ways of expression. When discussing his work, he gives plenty to the observers and also helps to understand other graffiti artists.


These dialogical skills are for the benefit of the pupils in his graffiti courses which he has been offering for some years. Pupils in particular have the right instinct for authentic personalities and genuine efforts from their teachers.


Akte brings in much of his feelings to his work, also their conversions. Though this does not change the handwriting that always remains recognizable. The script always matters greatly to him and it is in some way his “alter ego“, by which he wants to communicate and inspire others.
His work lives above all by the forms, depth, individuality, and also his coulour canon, and aims at taking the observer into his world and inspire them to dream.


Akte one always remains the authentic graffiti artist, on the wall, on canvas and in his mixed media work, who develops the urban expression and the characteristics of graffiti writing and who will certainly surprise us with more work worth seeing.


art-consult, 2015
Klaus Karl Maxs