Street Artist in the Spotlight: Joachim Lambrechts
Belgian contemporary artist Joachim Lambrechts has spent much of his life moving between the freedom of the street and the intimacy of the studio. Born in Antwerp in 1986, he discovered graffiti as a child and became immersed in the city’s street-art scene while still at art school. What began with spray cans and walls gradually developed into a highly instinctive painting practice encompassing murals, drawing, oil, acrylic and mixed media.
His work is immediately recognisable for its raw figures, exaggerated faces, bold contours and flashes of intense colour, yet Joachim has never been interested in settling into a single fixed style. Characters, animals, musicians, boxers and fragments of everyday life move through his paintings with the immediacy of thoughts arriving faster than they can be edited. As he told GraffitiStreet in our first interview: “I’ve never started, I just never stopped.”
Image copyright Alex Stanhope / Graffitistreet
From Antwerp Graffiti to Painting
Joachim remembers first becoming fascinated by graffiti at around six years old, seeing old-school pieces from a tram in Antwerp. By his teens he was painting alongside graffiti writers and studying art, eventually leaving formal education as the street became an increasingly important part of his development. Read more at GraffitiStreet.
For years he became one of Belgium’s most active mural painters, travelling across Europe and developing the graphic characters and animals that became associated with his street work. Yet the studio had always existed alongside the walls.
Since around 2010, painting on canvas has increasingly become central to Joachim’s practice. Unlike many of his commissioned murals, which demanded sketches, planning and adaptation to architecture, his studio paintings are frequently begun without preliminary drawings or studies. Joachim allows the image to develop intuitively, responding to what happens on the surface rather than working towards a predetermined result.
That distinction became increasingly important. Joachim has since spoken about stepping away from regular commissioned murals when he felt some of the original “rock and roll” of underground graffiti had disappeared, returning his attention to his first love: painting on canvas and paper. Read more at White Paper by
Instinct, Imperfection and Everyday Life
The apparent simplicity of Joachim’s figures disguises an increasingly sophisticated relationship with painting. Eyes, mouths, teeth and heavily outlined bodies appear and disappear beneath loose marks, scraped surfaces and areas of rapidly applied colour. There is humour in the work, but also vulnerability, awkwardness and tension. Rather than polishing those elements away, Joachim often allows them to remain visible. The immediacy is part of the language.
His paintings draw heavily on personal experience, popular culture, memory, music and ordinary observations, transforming familiar imagery through a deliberately instinctive process. More recent bodies of work have ranged from jazz musicians and superheroes to increasingly pared-back figurative compositions.
It is a natural continuation of what graffiti gave him: the confidence to respond quickly, accept uncertainty and understand that an imperfect mark can sometimes carry more life than a carefully corrected one.
Joachim – Baking Eggs (2019). Available via GraffitiStreet
Joachim and GraffitiStreet
GraffitiStreet’s relationship with Joachim stretches back to 2015, when he joined our Underground exhibition in Shoreditch. During his first trip to London, he also painted the streets around the show, including a collaboration with Hunto in Bethnal Green. GraffitiStreet
He returned for Underground 2016, painting a pop-art cat on Hanbury Street and collaborating with 2Dirty on another Shoreditch wall. GraffitiStreet
Our relationship continued beyond London. In 2017, Joachim came to Chichester and created his large black King of Cats mural near Pallant. When the mural was later painted over following concerns that it was attracting antisocial behaviour, the reaction from the local community led Joachim back to the city.
His response was characteristically playful: The Watchdog, created to keep watch over the neighbourhood. Joachim subsequently produced an XL artwork based on the mural for a GraffitiStreet charity auction supporting Chichester Boys’ Club. GraffitiStreet
In 2018, GraffitiStreet presented Joachim’s debut London solo exhibition, Born to Paint. The title could hardly have been more appropriate for an artist whose relationship with painting has always appeared compulsive rather than calculated. GraffitiStreet
Joachim has continued to form part of the GraffitiStreet story, with studio works returning to Chichester for the opening of our permanent gallery in Chichester, and later appearing in Concrete & Colour. GraffitiStreet
Joachim ‘The Watchdog’. North Pallant, Street Art Chichester. Image © Alex Stanhope / GraffitiStreet
Related Reading
In our 2016 interview with Joachim, he discusses discovering graffiti as a child, his obsessive need to create and the constant evolution of his style.
Revisit Joachim’s first years with GraffitiStreet in Underground 2015, when he exhibited with artists including PichiAvo, Hunto, Bisser and My Dog Sighs.
Lier Up documents Joachim’s ambitious project to bring contemporary muralism into his Belgian hometown through a series of collaborations with artists including Bisser and Nils Westergard.
In Joachim’s Graffiti Art Pops Up in Brussels, an abandoned sports hall became an immersive extension of his GraffitiPOP universe.
Read the story behind King of Cats in Chichester and its unexpected sequel, The Watchdog.
Joachim’s movement towards gallery painting came into sharp focus with GraffitiStreet’s Born to Paint, his debut London solo exhibition in 2018.
More Artists in the Spotlight
Discover Hunto, who painted alongside Joachim during GraffitiStreet’s early Underground years and similarly developed a distinctive figurative language through graffiti, colour and spontaneous mark-making.
Belgian artist Bisser shares Joachim’s fascination with eccentric characters and creatures, while their practices have crossed repeatedly through the Belgian street-art scene and Joachim’s Lier Up project.
You can also explore Nils Westergard, another artist whose relationship with Joachim stretches through Lier Up and whose practice similarly moves between large public walls and a highly individual studio language.
Discover Joachim Lambrechts at GraffitiStreet
GraffitiStreet has worked with Joachim Lambrechts since 2015, from the streets of Shoreditch and our Underground exhibitions to his London solo show, Chichester murals and contemporary studio paintings.
Joachim Lambrechts – Walk in The Park. Available via GraffitiStreet
Joachim Lambrechts – Red Vase and Flowers. Available via GraffitiStreet
Explore Joachim Lambrechts at GraffitiStreet to discover his work, or contact GraffitiStreet for acquisitions, sourcing, commissions and private viewings.
Visit GraffitiStreet Gallery, 25A West Street, Chichester, West Sussex, England PO19 1QW.