Urban Stories: eight practices meet at KIRK Gallery

Urban Stories brought SNIK, Telmo, Hera of Herakut, Martin Whatson, Augustine Kofie, Anders Gjennestad, Guy Denning and Alexis Mata to KIRK Gallery in Aalborg from September 5 to September 26, 2026. Presented at Danmarksgade 8, the exhibition examined movement between public space and the studio through artists whose tools and supports extend well beyond a single definition of street art. Exhibition listing

KIRK’s announcement introduced SNIK and Mata as new names at the gallery. It framed the exhibition around relationships between monumental and intimate scale, and between established craft and experiment. The opening programme on September 5 ran from noon to 2 p.m., with a formal opening at 12:30. The gallery’s account gives the shared exhibition a clear purpose: to bring different ways of making images into conversation as their setting changes. KIRK’s announcement

Construction, drawing and painting

Augustine Kofie’s Tapet Set offers a particularly concrete example. The 42 × 42 cm work combines found paper, acrylic polymer, ballpoint pen and graphite on a cradled birch panel. Its framing incorporates reclaimed yardstick material. Here, the transition into a gallery object preserves the presence of gathered and repurposed matter. The panel and its frame are documented parts of the work’s construction, giving the exhibition’s interest in the handmade a tangible point of reference. Tapet Set

Guy Denning’s Always in your Corner, Sunshine takes another route through a 70 × 100 cm mixed-media drawing on paper, presented varnished and framed. KIRK’s introduction discusses Denning’s charcoal practice and attention to human emotion. Within this exhibition, a drawing makes room for the direct marks of a hand alongside the repeated planning and cutting involved in stencil work. His participation expands the conversation from the place where an image appears to the process through which it is formed. Always in your Corner, Sunshine

Oil painting also has a substantial presence. Mata’s Flowers on gold Vase measures 150 × 140 cm, while Telmo’s Emergence is a 100 × 70 cm oil on canvas. Their inclusion gives the exhibition a wider material range than its urban-art title might initially suggest. A visitor following the documented checklist could move between paper-based construction, drawing, oil painting and stencil-led work while staying within the same curatorial question about how images occupy different spaces. Flowers on gold Vase · Emergence

SNIK in the group

SNIK’s role in that exchange is established by four specific works in the gallery’s 25-work public inventory: two Flourish originals, Between Us/Beyond Us and the earlier After Dawn. The three 2026 originals carry the duo’s hand-cut practice into this varied group setting. Their separate supports, dimensions and visual differences are explored in our comparison of SNIK’s KIRK originals. At exhibition level, the important connection is the shared attention to making: SNIK’s carefully constructed portraits sit within a programme that brings together assembled surfaces, drawn marks and oil paint.