the street is our gallery

Banksy once said that “the people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit”. The House of Representatives of Cyprus, doesnt agree!

While the financial crisis still causes a general feeling of frustration and defiance, with the public area being the easiest target of vandalism, and while at the same time the Cyprus capital is entering a new era after the Old Town revival and the long-awaited renovation of the historical Eleftherias Square, large public murals are being absent from Nicosia, despite the smaller scale street art blossoming in our urban setting.

iNO (Greece)

With these in mind, and also believing that now is the right time for Nicosia to become the European regional urban center of the south-eastern Mediterranean, reconfiguring its modern identity, the Research, Studies and Publications’ Service of the House of Representatives of the Republic of Cyprus took the initiative of “Eik-astiki Paremvasi” ( Urban-artistic Intervention), a public art project of 6 large scale murals being painted in the center of Nicosia during April 2016.

FIKOS (Greece)

The Service strongly believes that public art is sublime indeed as it belongs eventually to anyone, to any citizen or traveler, to any one of us, wherever it is created, interacting in a long term basis with the people and the surrounding urban space. This unique project is not only ground breaking because it brings large scale murals in Nicosia for the first time ever, but mostly because one of the walls painted is located in the Parliament itself, a fact that probably counts as a worldwide originality.

Color Nomads (Cyprus) at work

The artists that took part in this project are six prominent artists from Cyprus and abroad:  iNO (Greece), Fikos(Greece), Paparazzi (Cyprus), Color Nomads (Cyprus-Switzerland) and Opsis (Cyprus).

Enjoy the fine murals fully developed or during their creation:

iNO (Greece)

iNO (Greece) detail

iNO (Greece)

iNO (Greece)

FIKOS (Greece) detail

FIKOS (Greece)

Color Nomads (Cyprus)

Opsis (Cyprus) Mural

Poster – Map of the city with the location of the murals