About murals and street art
- Galina Bakinova
- Jul 18
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 3
In october 2024 I visited the street art gallery in Linz, Mural Harbor Gallery. The gallery is located in a remote part of the city in an industrial area. It is an open-air space with a large number of hangars and storage areas. Thanks to this, there are a huge number of large-scale blank walls on the gallery’s territory, which artists are invited to paint. According to the gallery’s guide, they independently select the authors for the works on the walls, so they don’t hold any open calls. At the same time, collectors have the opportunity to purchase works located on the walls of the gallery. The tour lasts just over an hour. We look at each work and the guide tells us about the authors of the works, sometimes about the works themselves.
It starts very interestingly, the first works look like patterns and are aesthetically very pleasant to look at. These are the works of Austrian street artist Manuel Skirl. The artist works in a fairly recognizable style; his works are found both in street spaces, abandoned buildings, and in galleries.
Manuel Skirl’s artwork
Next we see huge iron industrial structures, one of which is painted to look like a ketchup package. This is not street art or a mural, it looks very amateurish. Perhaps if I had seen this “ketchup” construction somewhere in a completely industrial area, among solid metal structures, then I would have thought “hmm, interesting.” But in this place it looks like some kind of forced decoration measure.
The “Ketchup” construction
Next comes the work of Kenyan artist Adam Masawa. I like both the style and the plot, I like that the background for the work is painted a rusty color. The naive style of the image is ideally combined with the sincerity of the narrative and plot. The playful form of the narrative raises quite serious issues that concern the artist, in this case visa issues. I really like this work and unfortunately it is one of the few that left a positive impression on me.
The work of the next author is located very close, on the next section of the wall. This is an artist from Greece, FIKOS. She also has a very recognizable style and generally an impressive portfolio of murals. I like the graphic and monochrome style of the work.
.......But around this point I begin to realize that I am getting bored. I’m starting to photograph not murals, but beautiful reflections of puddles, successful combinations of a yellow fence with gray asphalt, and neat cubes of pallets. Realizing that I am bored in such a large-scale gallery, I wonder why? There are a lot of works, all are different, the location is interesting and textured, why isn’t this interesting to me?
We are moving further through objects with murals. We meet a sloppy homage to “Brotherly Kiss” (work by Dmitry Vrubel in Berlin). This work was made by artists Martin Grubinger & Gerhard Haderer. They, as far as I understand, are also DJs who play improvised instruments. The mural looks so strange that if the work were not in this gallery, I would think that it was done by some teenager. Of course, the guide explained to us that this depicts some kind of comical plot and that this is a reference to the original work. But this explanation does not help the work.
My photos
Then follows a whole series of works, varied in style, meaning and visual content. Tagging, small-format portraits of famous personalities, huge murals, decorative paint smudges, etc. I’m perplexed and still trying to figure out what I don’t like here so much.
We move on to the next murals, where we see very high-quality decorative work. One of the works absolutely repeats the style of Pokras Lampas’s works (or he repeats this style). When I saw it, I thought that Pokras was invited here, but it turned out not. The guide doesn’t even know about such a Russian artist. Unfortunately, I did not remember the name of the author of this work, but you can judge for yourself how close the style is to the works of Pokras Lampas.
Work on the left — artis’s artwork in the Mural Gallery, work on the right - Pokras Lampas
Next we are shown a mural like an optical illusion. The work is created in such a way that the convex part of the building seems to be missing. If I had seen this technique 10–15 years ago, I would definitely have been surprised or even freaked out. But, come on. It’s the 24th year. I’ve seen a million of these optical illusions on the Internet, depicting cliffs on a flat floor, steps on smooth streets and other things. Now it looks so outdated that it’s surprising how such work was placed in a street art gallery.
What’s the matter? What’s wrong with me?
The problem lies in the concept of the gallery itself, in my opinion. The curators tried to combine too many different works — murals and street art, to unite different authors working with completely different concepts and different techniques.
The space turned out to be a hodgepodge of everything. Each section of the wall is painted randomly. It’s as if in an ordinary gallery, instead of the work of a curator, the artists themselves came and hung their favorite works, someone would bring a portrait, someone a still life, someone a photograph, and someone an abstraction. Some of the artists would bring work in a modern style, and some in an academic style. And all this would hang in one room the way the artists themselves wanted. I think that the viewer of such an exhibition would not understand anything, could not find his way and left it. I see roughly the same thing here. The gallery invites authors not according to some concept, but, as it seems to me, according to the principle “oh, we’ve never had this before.” Unfortunately, I did not see any integrity of the exhibition. If each work was in a separate place, it would look much better. The viewer would only be in contact with the work and the environment.
The second thing I realized in this gallery is that I do not classify murals as street art. We all know the history of street art. Second half of the 20th century, USA, street art began with simple illegal tagging. Of course, then many trends in this type of art appeared, it developed, a conceptual part was added, artists began to use new techniques. But I can’t include murals in the concept of “street art”. Why? Mural is a type of monumental painting. The difficulty is that creating a large-format work requires a long time, which means the location and plot must be agreed upon in advance. Such agreements require the artist to agree not only on the visual aesthetics of the work but also on its plot. Murals may serve some propaganda purposes (not only in the political sense). Of course, all of these factors prevent murals from fitting into the category of street art, which is by nature spontaneous, uncoordinated, and more rule-breaking than rule-following. The decorative view of the murals, their scale, and often excessive colorfulness make this type of art in my eyes too decorative. Well, if we talk about my personal feelings from the murals, then for me they resonate too much with the monumental art of the Soviet Union. And so far, no stylistics of the new murals can rid me of this association, alas.
Lastly.
At the end of the excursion the guid us cans of spray paint, highlighted a piece of the wall and asked us to draw something too. I drew my signature eye with a tear. There was little time, and neither were colors. Well, of course, all our work was painted over, I assume, on the same day. So my sudden art was in the Mural Gallery in Linz for one day.
The inscription on the wall “Eyes are afraid” by Galina Bakinova
Author: Galina Bakinova
Date: 30.11.2024
Update: 18.07.2025
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The article reflects the personal subjective opinion of the author
