Daim and contemporary abstraction

As an ardent fan of the modern abstraction that dominated the early part of the 20th century, I’m always a bit intrigued by contemporary adaptations and extensions of the style. The trouble is, very rarely are artists able to produce non-derivative works. There has been some work in computational expressionism and interactivity that I find fascinating, but for the most part artists who dabble in contemporary abstraction don’t live up to Kandinsky’s or Mondrian’s vision of a complex, visuo-linguistic medium.

I’ve been largely intrigued by the work of Daim, though. Daim is a polymath graphic artist who specializes in graffiti-esque art. He seems to meet the constraints of abstraction while touching upon contemporary graphic design issues of semiotics, thereby elaborating on the movement. Here is a wall of his in Wuppertal, Germany:

What’s impressive is not just his attention to detail, his careful chiaroscuro, and his use of layers, but also his direct use of symbols (e.g., the arrow) that signify directionality (but nothing more) for the viewer. It’s a style of his that’s taken nearly a decade to perfect, but one that extends abstraction in a very interesting way.