Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Guido Van Helten’s Giant Murals Feature East-European Textile Patterns

Minsk, the capital of Belarus, was recently taken over by street art festival Urban Myths. For this festival, artists had to explore the city for three days, plunge into the city’s atmosphere and then create original paintings based on urban folklore. After studying the locals and their traditions, British-Australian artist Guido Van Helten chose to paint a girl dressed in an embroidered red and white shirt. The red and white embroidery is a part of Eastern Europe culture, as it appears in Belarus's national flag as well as in the citizen's everyday clothing.

Minsk, the capital of Belarus, was recently taken over by street art festival Urban Myths. For this festival, artists had to explore the city for three days, plunge into the city’s atmosphere and then create original paintings based on urban folklore. After studying the locals and their traditions, British-Australian artist Guido Van Helten chose to paint a girl dressed in an embroidered red and white shirt. The red and white embroidery is a part of Eastern Europe culture, as it appears in Belarus’s national flag as well as in the citizen’s everyday clothing. Guido used the same pattern as seen in his previous piece for CityArt project in Kiev, Ukraine. On the 18-story building that he painted earlier in October, a Ukrainian woman is depicted wearing the same type of traditional embroidery as the one in Minsk. According to the CityArt team, Guido said he was inspired by the femininity and beauty that he finds in Ukrainian women.

Guido Van Helten’a work for the Urban Myths Project, supported by the British Embassy in Belarus, was painted at the Academy of the Belarusian state University of Culture where it is now on view.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Puerto Rican street artist Alexis Diaz (covered here) recently teamed up with Chilean artist INTI to create a new mural for O.Bra Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Their mural, which took over 1 week to complete, blends the two artist's distinct imagery: Diaz's detailed and crosshatched line work with colorful under layers, and INTI's subjects inspired by life, death and religion, particularly Christianity. It features a surreal split-image of a skeletal robed woman, crowned with flowers and holding up a mechanical-like heart.
Ricky Lee Gordon, who also paints under the moniker of Freddy Sam, is a Cape Town, South Africa based artist focused on bringing to light social issues with his large scale murals. "My intention with this and all my murals is to create an artwork that has meaning to the community who will live with the mural," Gordon writes at his blog. He is also known for his curatorial work and creative activism, notably as the co-founder of Colour Ikamva, an art outreach program designed to re-imagine education through creativity and self-empowerment.
Isaac Cordal has been leaving his sculptures of tiny cement figures in cities all over the world for years. Featured on our blog, his artworks hidden in plain sight feature gloomy people wading helplessly in puddles, other times peering through cracks in the sidewalk and concrete walls. They are part of an ongoing series that he calls "Cement Eclipses". Cordal explains, "Cement Eclipses is a critical definition of our behavior as a social mass. The art work intends to catch the attention on our devalued relation with the nature through a critical look to the collateral effects of our evolution." The Spanish artist recently updated his site with his latest works, installed in New York City in November.
In 2014, Italian artist Millo won a competition that enabled him paint 13 multi-story murals in Turin. His work now fills the walls of the small, northern Italian city, inviting playful scenarios into the mundane humdrum of urban life. Millo's murals center around vague, childlike characters, whom he renders in the form of line drawings without many distinguishing features. The lack of detail allows viewers to imagine themselves as these quirky figures, who tower over buildings and seem to use the city as their playground. It's as if the kids got a chance to run things while the adults were away.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List