Tag: street art

KNOxOUT, the mural in Warsaw that absorbs as much pollution as 780 Trees

Adam

Who would have though that simply painting a mural on the side of a regular building would have the same pollution-cleaning effect as planting 780 trees? Organized by the sportswear company Converse as part of their City-Forests campaign, the latest mural in Warsaw, Poland, is not only an aesthetically pleasing artwork, but also an ingenious way to tackle a hot-topic as urban pollution. Painted using photocatalytic paint with titanium dioxide, on a building that faces the busy metro station Politechnika, the ingenious mural reportedly attracts airborne pollutants before converting them…

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Around the world in pandemic Street Art

Pavel

Throughout the ages, artists have taken their messages to public spaces, from Pompeii’s walls in Roman times to New York City’s subway cars in the 1980s. Driven by the current pandemic and its unique and unusual aesthetic, made of knobby viruses, face masks and messages of solidarity, creatives around the world have continued to express themselves publicly. During lockdown, cities and not only were studded with love for healthcare workers, cynicism for politicians, frustration at the crisis, or simple encouragement. We have collected some of these messages, depicted in street…

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Scaf: the French artist whose realistic graffiti art seems to Jump off the walls

Robin

As lockdowns loosen, people start wandering into the streets to appreciate fresh air, open spaces, but also some more or less decent graffiti on the walls. But there is an artist really incredible: his stage name is scaf, or scaf_oner on Instagram and, moreover, he isn’t a mere “vandal”. “I love to paint in all of these abandoned places. Above all, I like abandoned houses, manors, castles and factories,” he said. By doing so, he transforms them and adds extra value to them, rather than the opposite and the work…

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The sad story of the half-constructed abandoned resort at Cala d’en Serra – Ibiza

Ivan

We are in Spain. In the far north of the island near Portinax is a beautiful little horseshoe shaped beach called Cala d’en Serra, surrounded by high pine covered cliffs with crystal clear waters. This beach was also named one of Europe’s top beaches, according one of lot reports onlline. Despite it is much like many of the smaller beaches across Ibiza, what makes this truly special is the abandoned resort situated just meters above the beach. In 1969, a luxury hotel resort was planned for construction on one of…

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Weissensee Abandoned Children’s Hospital – Berlin

randomcollabs

We are in Berlin, where an empty, tumble-down, complex sits amidst handsome new apartment buildings in Weissensee neighborhood. Though a curious passerby probably never wouldn’t guess it, this crumbling graffiti gallery was once a cutting-edge pediatric medical facility, abruptly banished 20 years ago to a bizarre limbo that continues to this day. The story of so-called Kinderkrankenhaus-Weißensee (Weissensee Children’s Hospital) began in 1908, to help combat rising infant mortality rates at the time. Construction got underway in June 1909, overseen by the prominent architect Carl James Bühring, who built a…

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Macromural de Pachuca: the world’s largest mural covers a large swath of homes in Mexico.

Ivan

We are just north of Mexico City, in Pachuca de Soto, the capital city of the Mexican State of Hidalgo. The city boasts one of the largest murals in the world. Murals have always been an example of artwork around the world. Excluding the luxurious wall murals in Pompeiian villas, or the various streetart inside lot of abandoned places, most murals, at least the modern ones, adorn building’s exteriors and are meant for public consumption. But in few cases are the murals so big that they stretch across multiple buildings,…

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Fort de la Chartreuse: the fort that was never used…as a fort!

Anya016

The Fort de la Chartreuse is an about 150-year-old fortification that once should have been defend the Amercœur neighborhood of Liège in Belgium, but is now an abandoned big ruin that is slowly being overtaken by foliage and graffiti. Built between 1817 and 1823, the fortress rests on the grounds of a former Carthusian (Ordre des Chartreux) monastery in operation until the French Revolution, on an elevated hill in Liège, and it is part of the fortification line along the river Meuse which crosses Belgium. It was originally built by…

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Metelkova: the alternative cultural center in Ljubljana

Ivan

If you ask any local in Ljubljana, they will point you in the right direction, 5 minutes from the city centre of Slovenia’s capital city. The area now known as Metelkova (full name in Slovene: Avtonomni kulturni centre Metelkova mesto, “Metelkova City Autonomous Cultural Centre”) was once a military barracks, but you would never know it by its state today, covered in a psychedelic cacophony of colorful street art, graffiti, and every kind of punk rock visuals. Originally commissioned by the Austro-Hungarian army back in 1882 and completed in 1911,…

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Chloride, Arizona: a living Ghost Town~

Leo S

Located just a short drive from the abandoned (and almost disappeared) town of Santa Claus, Chloride seems to resemble any kitschy Wild West village turned tourist trap. However, if you look a little deeper, you’ll find something that makes this ghost town stand out: a wonderfully unusual collection of junk art and a display of giant murals! The city is an old silver mining camp in Mohave County and the oldest continuously inhabited mining town in the state. Scientifically, chloride is an ion used to desalinate seawater into drinking water,…

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The altered traffic signs of Edinburgh, Scotland

Ivan

We are in Einburgh, Scotland. Scattered around the city center are a number of traffic signs that have been given new life through amusing graffiti stickers. A keen eye but not only may spot a sumo wrestler, a spilled glass of wine, or a cat, but are just a few of the nearly two dozen total altered traffic signs. They are the work of French artist Clet Abraham, 52, who hand-draws the designs, prints them onto sticker paper and goes out at night to place them. Clet first began placing…

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The doomed city of Doel, Belgium

Anya016

In the Flemish province of East-Flanders, there is a subdivision of the municipality of Beveren called Doel. Doel now is a belgian ghost town, located close to the port of Antwerp. However, in the very near future the little city will only exist in pictures and memories: it seems, in fact, that it is scheduled to be completely destroyed to make room for an expanding harbor. Even protest and the incredible street art in the abandoned town cannot stop its inevitable fate. For over 400 years, Doel stood near Antwerp…

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International Car Forest of the Last Church~

Leo S

The International Car Forest of the Last Church is the unusual dream project of two Nevada artists. Some artists work with paint, others with clay, marble or stone. Chad Sorg’s challenge was to make art with cars, buses and trucks and this “church” looks more similar to a druidic henge of junkers than any Christian chapel! The product of artists Chad Sorg and Mark Rippie, the Car Forest began when the Reno artist Chad Sorg was driving through Goldfield, Nevada, several years ago and saw a vehicle sticking out of…

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Nikita Golubev, the artist who turns dirty cars into works of Art

Nathan

In his Moscow’s neighborhood, Russian artist Nikita Golubev aka Pro Boy Nick uses dirt found on trucks and vans to draw with his fingers incredible artworks. However, it seems that the owners love them so much that they now refuse to wash their trucks! Art is decidedly unconventional, and many have uploaded photographs of Gobulev’s works on the web. The artist’s “canvases” are cars, trucks or vans, and result is a work that looks like a charcoal drawing, beautiful in its simplicity. ProBoyNick’s Instagram account has become very popular, and…

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Street artist Megx painted german bridge to look like giant LEGO Bricks

Pavel

While driving through the outskirts of Wuppertal in the Rhine-Rhur metropolitan region of Germany, drivers are wont to stare in disbelief the a giant multicolored cluster of Legos hovers from a bridge overhead. Although the visual effect is exactly this, in reality the bridge is (obviously) made of concrete and steel. These Legos are actually the product of more than a century of locomotive history: the Wuppertal Northern Railway was constructed in 1879 to compete with the adjacent BME line for train passengers crossing through Wuppertal, Germany. But the BME…

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Huang Yung-Fu, the 96-year-old painter who saved his village

Pavel

It’s 04:00 in central Taiwan and everything is asleep, flashing neon signs of the city of Taichung are off and the only movement in the night is the silhouette of a 96-year-old man slowly painting alone in the darkness. Every morning, Huang Yung-fu flips on a light, shuffles out of his two-room bungalow in sandals and while the city around him sleeps, he crouches on a stool for three hours and quietly decorates the drab cement. Now in the city tiny tigers leap from the walls, whiskered kittens hide in…

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983 Followers: the spooky mural in an abandoned house in the countryside of Scotland

Leo S

Spanish artist and illustrator Daniel Munoz, aka “SAN”, made a mural in Scotland, where he spent a few days working in an abandoned building somewhere in the Scottish countryside. Entitled “983 Followers”, this beautiful piece of work was painted on concrete using acrylic and brushes, a different way of painting than the traditional spray-cans murals, and it is showing hundreds of monochrome silhouettes giving a rather impressive effect. The mural covers three of four walls of an abandoned building and portrays the images of a large number of men (really…

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La Madone de São Paulo, Brasil: the giant mural in memory of our mortality.

Ivan

We are in Brazil, in São Paulo’s city center: this giant mural of Santa Muerte reminds passersby of their own mortality. Painted on the side of a building in downtown of the brazilian city, this elegant and fantasmagoric mural representation of Santa Muerte, aka Our Lady of Holy Death, confronts you with your mortal destiny and your short time on Earth. The genesis of this unusual contemporary memento mori, titled La Madone de São Paulo, came in 2015 through an artistic collaboration between the Puerto Rican artist Alexis Diaz and…

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