20 August 2026
Florence
The carnet of events and proposals of Palazzo Castri is embellished with important cultural happenings. In fact, on Saturday, Feb. 1, from 6 p.m., the exhibition of urban artist KRAITA317 was inaugurated, conceived and curated together with Street Levels Gallery, a talented international gallery with its own focus on urban art based in Florence, in the lively Via Palazzuolo, just a few steps from the Central Station of Santa Maria Novella.
The collaboration with SLG, which began last year with the exhibition of works by Austrian artist HNRX, is renewed for 2025 and has, for Palazzo Castri, a twofold objective. On the one hand, the desire to strengthen the link between the Hotel and the Florentine territory, nurtured by a fervid youth art scene, and on the other to be an incentive to bring art with its profound contents inside its walls, in order to stand as a reference point for artists, enthusiasts and collectors.
Born in the Romanian town of Brasov in 1996, KRAITA317 trained as a self-taught artist with his own crew of writers and arrived in Italy as a young teenager, bringing with him an experiential background that makes visual language and the urgency to express himself his main distinguishing features.
The young artist's site-specific productions for the elegant boutique hotel in Independence Square are unprecedented and made in a poster version: the abstract perspective, which boldly investigates the relationship between the street and sociality, between peripheral areas and the swarming of voices and stories that make up the urban collectivity, gives visitors a composite, biting and yet never personalistic image of the artist's inner world.
In the works previously created at some of the most iconic and aesthetically impactful hotspots in the city's territory (from the Ex Manicomio Banti to the Varlungo Bridge, or the Indian Viaduct) KRAITA317 always knows how to delicately and pointedly bring the viewer's eyes back to a color, a shape that opens further scenarios for desire or imagination.
Here then is the impulse of that 12-year-old boy running about 2 kilometers on a railway line being chased by the police (note from his biography) captures and disrupts, even managing to remove - for a few seconds - our perception as mere viewers of the work and bring us out of our individuality, in the hope of reconstructing - together - a unique collective lens of observation, that is, a new form of future and hope.
KRAITA317's works will remain on view until January 26, 2026.
Street Levels Gallery is an international urban art gallery based in Florence. Born from the encounter between artists and cultural producers, the gallery aims to be an environment capable of investigating the various levels of interaction of art - between street, public and exhibition space - interacting with the urban fabric in a mutual, constantly changing exchange. With this in mind, the staff of Street Levels Gallery has generated a reality entirely dedicated to artistic experimentation, the display of works, and the production of connections, human plots, and shared planning. Art is the medium through which to narrate the paths and artistic expressions born in the street, supporting their existence, and, at the same time, trying to break down those narrative and stereotypical limits that exist between public and private space, between the street and the exhibition place. Street Levels Gallery mediates and reconciles different artistic visions with the needs of private individuals, public administrations and the community. The gallery collaborates with municipalities, festivals, art festivals, museums, companies, associations, collectives, universities, public and private entities, in order to spread and promote the Urban Art movement in Italy and around the world.
For more information: www.streetlevelsgallery.com
