Street Art

Street art is a visual language of public space that carries creativity into the street, turning façades, walls and urban surfaces into a canvas accessible to everyone. Its core idea is a direct, often extra-institutional address to the viewer, a dialogue with the urban environment and its social context. It grew out of the graffiti culture of the 1970s, when tags and aerosol "writing" flooded the New York subway. Formally, street art is extraordinarily diverse: from calligraphic tags and graffiti "wild styles" to large realistic murals, stencils, stickers, mosaics and paste-ups. Its palette may be bright and punchy or monochrome and graphic, depending on the concept and technique. Technically, its artists use aerosol, stencil and roller, while large murals require projection and lifts. Composition takes account of the supporting architecture, fitting the image into the rhythm of the city. Its motifs embrace social critique, political statement, poetic metaphor and playful provocation. Its global icons are the Briton Banksy, with his sharp stencils, and the American Keith Haring. In Ukraine, street art has undergone a powerful flowering: the monumental murals of Volodymyr Manzhos and Oleksii Bordusov (the Interesni Kazki duo), as well as numerous patriotic and memorial paintings across cities after 2014 and 2022. Today the movement is valued for its democratic spirit, the sharpness of its statement and its capacity to humanise urban space.