The first time I visited Matrijaršija, the print studio in Belgrade that became the founding collective of this gallery, every wall was covered. Posters from the floor to the ceiling, back to back, in every colour, style and format. There was no white space left at all. I loved the energy of it, and that image became the name.

At its simplest, FORGET ABOUT WHITE WALLS means rejecting minimalism and living with art the maximalist way. But it also stands for the artists we work with: people connected to punk, underground music, political activism and anarchist ideas. Artists who break rules, bend them, and make their own visual languages. The work is expressive, uncompromising and full of character. The name is a curatorial approach and a statement about who we are.

We first showed on a table on Brick Lane in December 2014, with about seven prints from the Matrijaršija studio: Igor Hofbauer, Mathieu Desjardins, Nina Bunjevac. A very small beginning, but the work stopped people immediately because it looked like nothing else around it. The people who stopped were varied, but they shared one quality, and they still do: they are very much their own person. Our collectors have confidence in their own taste. They know what they like and they aren't frightened of choosing something unusual.

I found many of our artists through parties and electronic music. I was organising nights in Warsaw and travelling across Eastern Europe because of what was happening in its underground scenes, and that is where I met some of the most important artists we work with. Creative communities are interconnected: find one extraordinary studio and they introduce you to the next. What I look for is conviction. A clear visual language, a strong sense of what the work wants to say, and an identity that runs through everything the artist makes. You feel it immediately when the work is right. Then I ask whether the artist belongs in the wider collection, because our artists have very different styles and their work still speaks to each other.

For ten years we ran galleries in East London and Soho. The night I think of most is the Floating BSTRD retrospective, not long after we opened the Soho space: five years of his work for the electronic music scene, DJs playing, the gallery full and everyone dancing. From the mezzanine you could see a whole room of people, art and music together. That was the whole idea of FAWW in one room: the art never separated from the culture that made it.

We don't have that building any more. We have the nights, the pop-ups, the fairs and, now and then, the kiosk at Spitalfields Market, and we take the work wherever the people are.

Nothing here is mass-produced. Some editions we receive one, two or three prints of. The largest print runs rarely go past 150 copies. Every print carries the story of the artist, the studio and the community it came from, and that story travels: a piece made by a tiny collective in Belgrade can end up on a wall in Tokyo or Los Angeles. These artists are not making work for algorithms. They are devoted to their craft, their collaborators and the process of printmaking. When you take one home, you're taking a pure and honest expression of that artist, and you're directly supporting a grassroots culture and helping it survive. It isn't disposable. It's something to live with.

Never let a white wall go unchallenged.

Sarah Kravitz, founder