the street is our gallery

Exploring the limits of art ETAM Cru & Robert Proch have joined forces to create a true masterpiece in the city of Lodz. Under the flag of UNIQA Art, the mural is presented to you by Michał Bieżyński – Art Director of UNIQA Art Łódź Project, Art Director of Galeria Urban Forms project (2009-2014):

‘After more than 6 years of the mural project in Łódź, I feel I can say the city centre has been adequately saturated with these works. I saw murals as the first, most logical and natural step towards thinking about a contemporary art gallery in Łódź’s urban spaces. The massed numbers of bare walls in the city centre virtually demanded to be filled with painting. The ideas has been put into practice, Łódź’s murals are famous all over the world and have become a major icon of the city. I wouldn’t like to cause a surfeit, though, a situation where numbers of the murals will be so high that the inhabitants will lose interest and the reception will become thoughtless.

That’s the reason why we’re starting the UNIQA Art Łódź project, to create various works of art – sculptures, bas-reliefs, installations, site-specific realizations. Diverse materials and technologies will be employed to make the project as varied as possible. It is essential that residents be presented with the broadest possible range of graphic solutions, so that the project, beside the purely artistic format, will offer some visual education. Moreover, the project is not a festival which is taking place at a definite time. It will function as an urban art programme, with particular realizations to be prepared during different months’.

‘Although UNIQA Art Łódź project is a step away from murals, there was one outstanding wall in central Łódź that virtually clamoured for painting. It has a great exposition – it’s in a pure centre of the city, next to very crowded spot with pubs, clubs and restaurants, thousands of citizens are passing by this wall every single day. Taking into account that extraordinary localisation and the unusual size of the wall, I thought that it has to be painted by some really special artists. Thinking about that, the choice was pretty simple – Etam Cru. The artists that are from Lodz, that are related to Lodz, they finished Academy of Fine Arts here, they painted six walls here and I can easily say that here their whole career have started here in Lodz.

They are the authors of one of the most famous murals in Lodz – the cyan Elephant”, “Chicken Lady” and of course Sainer’s “Primavera”. Now, they are globally well known artists and they are painting all over the world. It’s great that they came to the “hood” after 3 years. Since the beginning, when we started to talk about this wall, we we’re thinking about the collabo with Robert Proch – one of the best muralists in Poland, in my opinion one of the best young painters in Poland. He is creating amazing, multiplied forms, the great mixture between total chaos and pure order and harmony. I think that this collaboration makes this wall, one of the best and most interesting murals that will be done this year in the whole world’.

Artists: Etam Cru | Robert Proch
Title: ‘Enjoy the silence’
Address: Sienkiewicza 81, Lodz
Project: UNIQA Art Lodz
Curator: Michał Bieżyński
Organized by: @lodzmurals
#uniqaartlodz #lodzmurals

Links: 

www.facebook.com/lodzmurals

https://instagram.com/lodzmurals