Prague has no shortage of handsome walls, but this one takes a little of your stamina to fully experience. Stretching roughly 700 meters along Vlastina Street in Prague 6, Mural Ruzyně brings together 30 Czech and international artists across some 1,800 square meters of concrete. Unusually long, it remains visually alive, and the project’s strength lies in the work’s consistency across it. Rather than thirty unrelated commissions competing for attention, the mural is curatorially organized as a continuous sequence, with one visual language handing off to the next.
The project is the latest large-scale public-art effort from The Chemistry Gallery and its founder and artistic director, Petr Hájek, whose earlier mural work included the WALL STREET festival in 2022. That work now continues under Urban Pictus, the biennial festival and public-art platform founded the same year. Mural Ruzyně is the centerpiece of its third edition in 2026, bringing together 15 Czech artists and 15 international participants from Spain, Austria, Romania, Italy, Ireland, France, Germany, and Poland.
The announced theme, “City, Motion, Beauty,” is broad, and this first group of works shows how many directions it can take. Dozy Doss combines carefully rendered birds with looping graphic bands of red and blue; RAME13 reduces birds, cyclists, and movement into the cleaner economy of contemporary illustration; Chemis plays directly with the material of the wall through a trompe-l’oeil scene of cracking concrete. Elsewhere, YBR SHC builds a mechanical insect into a miniature urban ecosystem, while MATE brings a polished, almost airbrushed surrealism to cars, architecture, and oversized forms. These approaches share little formally, which may be the point.
The differences become sharper as the wall continues. Toy Box works narratively, using figures and episodes that feel closer to editorial illustration and graphic storytelling; Pauser breaks the surface into compact comic-like scenes and symbols; Luca Ledda builds a strange sequential passage of hands, flowers, eyes, planets, and repeated circular forms. RUIN turns toward crisp modernist geometry, David Strauzz uses the repeated pedestrian pictogram almost like a visual beat, and Tim Marsh pushes athletic bodies through angular, faceted fields of color and architectural space. Taken together, they show how far contemporary mural practice now travels beyond any single definition of “street art” — absorbing illustration, comics, graphic design, realism, surrealism, abstraction, signage, – and fragments of graffiti vocabulary along the way.
What holds the project together is not a common style but a high level of finish and a certain clarity of intention. These are not hurried interventions or walls dependent on confrontation for their charge; the artists have been given the room, materials, and organizational support to work at scale and to complete their ideas properly. The result is approachable without becoming generic, polished without becoming uniform, and useful as a snapshot of the many influences currently moving through mural and street-art practice. In this first of two parts, the pleasure is partly in seeing just how many different ways 700 meters of concrete can be persuaded to move.
Launched in 2022 and heading into its third edition in 2026, Urban Pictus is the mural festival shaping Prague’s public art future. Co-founded by Petr Hájek and Petr Kopal of The Chemistry Gallery, the biennial brings together the city’s cultural institutions, municipal partners, and an evolving network of post–Velvet Revolution creative districts. In a city defined by Gothic spires and Baroque curves, Urban Pictus doesn’t shy from the friction of graffiti and street art—it uses it. The festival has activated walls across Prague 1, 6, 7, 8, and 10, inserting large-scale muralism and street-rooted practices into the visual rhythm of a city known for its architectural legacy.
On our recent visit to the so-called City of a Hundred Spires (real count: more like 500), that energy was hard to miss. Prague’s street scene is compact but loaded, less sprawling than some but no less charged. Writers and muralists work tight: from industrial edges to sanctioned façades, they’re building a visual grammar that feels deliberate, hybrid, and defiantly local. You can see the push and pull—between reverence and rebellion, tradition and disruption. What’s emerging is a language that mixes studio finesse with graffiti instinct: abstract fields, narrative symbols, pop-text hits, and gestures that still carry the urgency of the street. The trains and tunnels haven’t gone quiet either—graffiti here still breathes fast, and the old codes hold.
Beyond being a wall project, Urban Pictus is a mural-driven platform with gallery exhibitions, guided tours, workshops, and crossover projects that build bridges between institutional and informal public-voiced scenes. Born out of The Chemistry Gallery’s commitment to newer voices in contemporary urban art, the festival walks both sides of the line between the street and the gallery.
Across its first two editions, Urban Pictus has hosted a sharp and varied roster: Innerfields (Germany), AEC / Interesni Kazki (Ukraine), M-City (Poland), Gorka Gil (Spain), Michal Škapa (Czech Republic), and Tim Marsh (France/Spain). More recent editions have added Toy_Box, YBR, Malujeme Jinak, Zeb One, and Matěj Olmer (Czech Republic), as well as Yessiow (Indonesia), expanding the festival’s reach across Europe and beyond.
With 2026 on the horizon, here are a few standout murals we caught on the ground this fall.
Toy_Box (Czech Republic) is known for blending classical painting, comic art, and street aesthetics. Her mural on Milady Horákové Street in Prague 7 honors the politician Milada Horáková on the 75th anniversary of her execution by the communist regime, depicting her portrait in fractured forms alongside a bilingual quote.
Tim Marsh (France/Spain) works in geometric abstraction, using bold colors and masking-tape precision. His 22-meter mural in Holešovice portrays David Attenborough surrounded by animals, part of his ongoing series celebrating biodiversity.
Innerfields (Germany), a trio known for blending realism and symbolism, painted a mural in Karlín of a figure staring at a smartphone while a levitating Earth floats nearby, striking him in the head—a reflection on digital distraction and environmental neglect.
Lukáš Veselý / Malujeme Jinak (Czech Republic). The brothers use optical tricks and graphic design to bring kinetic energy to this university environment. Their Holešovice mural on a student residence features abstract dancing figures that celebrate youth and movement.
M-City (Poland) is recognized on many continents for his large-scale stenciled cityscapes with industrial themes. His mural in Invalidovna, “Road Ahead Closed,” presents a dense monochrome metropolis made from layered mechanical motifs and factory forms.
AEC / Interesni Kazki (Ukraine) is known for surreal, mythic, sometimes epic murals. His piece “Chasing the Red Demon” in Holešovice allegorizes resistance to Soviet imperialism, referencing both Ukrainian and Czech histories.
Michal Škapa (Czech Republic) brings a graffiti-rooted, semi-abstract style to murals, often with cosmic or social themes. His Vesmír medúz (“Universe of Jellyfish”) in Prague’s Karlín district for the 2022 edition of “Wall Street Prague”, the inaugural version of what would later become Urban Pictus. Škapa painted a vertical mural that depicts glowing, jellyfish-like forms ascending like spacecraft against a dark background. The piece reflects his signature fusion of street art energy and speculative futurism, creating a surreal visual field that floats somewhere between deep sea and outer space.
Dede Bandaid (Israel) uses warm-toned urban illustration with metaphorical motifs. His mural “Ambitions” in Žižkov, created with poet Nitzan Mintz, pairs wooden animals with a Czech-language poem about creative drive and personal sacrifice.
EPOS 257 (Czech Republic) is a conceptual street artist known for anonymous public interventions. His “Graffomat” installation—shown at Urban Pictus 2025—is a vending machine that dispenses spray cans, satirizing the boundary between sanctioned art and illegal graffiti.
Our thanks to Chemistry Gallery and the many folks who volunteer to make this festival a success. Our thanks to our partner Urban Nation Museum (UN) in Berlin for their support as we bring the art on the streets and people of Prague to BSA.
In a demonstration of people power and the role of street artists as activists, we look today at a neighborhood called Poblenou in Barcelona, whose residents have been gripped in a struggle with real estate developers. The developers have tried to destroy the buildings, the history, and the culture of the area, the local citizen’s group says, and they intend to dissuade them. According to Poblenou neighbors, the large real estate company has attempted to persuade the local city board to purchase a cluster of buildings, including houses with great historical and emotional value, to replace them with offices and high-end residential buildings.
After about five years, the battle rages, with locals saying that the Poblenou neighborhood stands as a symbol of struggle and resistance for the working-class people who built it and that people are proud of what the area has accomplished over time. It is a familiar refrain, this gentrification brought by investors – often these days aided and abetted by the “beautification” of the neighborhood by artists.
In this case, the artists are lending their skills to help the fight for the neighborhood instead. The number includes artist Tim Marsh who lives here. Today we see the wall he and like-minded creatives created, focusing in many cases on people who live here, in “the Passage” of Poblenou.
We thank photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena for sharing his photos of some of the artists and their murals with BSA Readers.
The demonstrations and protests in support of George Floyd and against racism and police brutality continue in many cities across the US. Similarly, new reports from other countries of people marching in solidarity have brought the message to an international audience. Today we have a new mural by Tim Marsh sent to us by BSA contributor and photographer Lluis Olive who shares these images from Barcelona, Spain.
As one may expect, subtleties of language may get lost in translation, so we’ll briefly mention why “Black Lives Matter” is not the same as “All Lives Matter”, and in fact the latter is received by many in the US as a dismissal of blacks, a de-facto denial of the suffering of people in an effort to erase the magnitude of a deliberately designed unfair system that threatens black people’s lives.
First, it’s good to know that Black Lives Matter is actually an organization founded by three black women in 2013 – used as a hashtag to begin with – soon spawning a movement. The BLM name came to be known as a response to the casual denigration of the sanctity of the life of Trayvon Martin, who was shot by George Zimmerman and who was found “not guilty.” So, today using the term is directly tied to that organization and time no matter the current context.
Secondly, as a slogan, it is directly implied that the dominant white culture has done everything it can to deny the humanity to persons with dark skin, whether through a thousand tiny subtleties on a daily basis or through big obvious examples like state-sanctioned violence – and a gamut in between. It is a defiant statement that is made so obvious in intent that people cannot mistake its meaning. Consequently, for many, saying “All Lives Matter” is yet one more example of denigration, a sideways denial of the utter toxicity of racism and its impact, a re-direction away from the dire facts.
We know
that our international friends, like this artist here, are undoubtedly trying
to be inclusive when they say “All Lives Matter”. We just wanted to share that
some Americans won’t understand it as such, and they may even interpret the
slogan as an underhanded insult to blacks and other persons of color. After
all, Women’s Rights wouldn’t even be an issue if women’s rights were equally encoded
by law and absolutely insured by a fair process in greater society. Until then
we’ll talk about Women’s Rights, GLBTQ Rights, Disabled Rights, etcetera.
Black Lives
Matter.
UPDATE: Since publishing this article we received a message from the artist of this work above. He let us know that he had already painted over this slogan with “Black Lives Matter” – only a day after he first painted it and not as a result of this article. He had in fact not understood the implications and once he did he wanted to be clear with his intentions. This is a win for everyone, and to whatever extent we can share information and ideas to raise our collective awareness with each other and learn from each other, we say “yes!”
PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ. First wall after the lock down. I wanted to paint something else, but the news over the world have made me react. What the actual fuck, people. It seems that all over the world, racism has been increasing lately…
This is just an example of what white supremacism is causing over the
world. The latest news happened in the USA, but some similar stories
happened lately in france too, With people from other origins. . This is why at first i used the sentence “All lives matter”. And then some of you explained that white supremacists were using this beautiful phrase to protest against the protests. Which led me to go correct the text on the wall. Which leaves me with a wierd feeling, like forgetting about ALL the other cases. AND I REALLY HOPE TO SEE YOU ALL SUPPORTING THEIR CAUSE TOO.
I strongly encourage ALL the people over the world to keep fighting.
Bring justice to all those abused by the police, and by all acts of
racism. MAKE RACISTS ASHAMED. BE ANTI-RACIST All my support goes to all the people protesting, and fighting against racism, all over the world. ✊✊?✊?✊?✊?✊?
Images today from La Nau Bostik, an artist run complex in Barcelona that aims to be sustainable, inspirational, and a breathing living cultural oasis. By most accounts, it succeeds wildly.
Murals often accompany citizen-run cultural initiatives and art spaces like these, frequently to great effect. The spaces are raw and neglected and needs a sense of life and color; new narratives to fill the space with interactions and hopefully inspire collaboration.
Xavier Basiana and his cultural compatriots have established a community cultural and intellectual place in a settlement of ex-industrial warehouses over the last decade along the train tracks in La Sagrera, and the once barren soil now sprouts an ever growing crop of portraits, characters, fantasies, political and social messages.
In cities that we have the opportunity to visit we occasionally get to see these vibrant spaces like La Nau Bostik, now a cultural fixture that draws thousands throughout the year for a rich mix of programming and engagement. Surrounded by great organic works on the walls by fine artists and current or former Street Artists and graffiti writers, the environment seems to foster a re-generation of people-fueled ideas for progress, problem solving and dreaming.
Ivan Floro. Nau Bostik, Barcelona. (photo LluÍs Olivé Bulbena)
Without the synergistic effects of weaving all of these elements of education, celebration, theater, academic examination, civic engagement, the plastic arts, performance, labor, and commerce, these places may not be able to offer a safe place for free thought and internal exploration. As ever, it is the combined effect of a variety of talents that creates the greater sum. With so many factors and parties at play, maintaining a sense of balance is an ongoing goal.
Today we are happy to visit this arts space via the camera work of photographer Lluis Olive Bulbena, who we thank for sharing his images with BSA readers.
G. James Daichendt. Robbie Conal: Streetwise: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art. Schiffer, 2020. Reprinted from the original review. …Read More »
A vast aquatic landscape painted on the pavement becomes a collective artwork and an open-air playground.Artistic direction by Andrea Conte …Read More »
BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
