Urban Forms: Łódź paints its blind walls

Łódź (the name comes out closer to “woodge” than anything an English speaker would guess) is Poland’s third city and was, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its textile capital. The mills made it rich quickly, and the mills have mostly gone, leaving a city of around 730,000 people with a shrinking population and a lot of old building stock. The speed of the boom still shows in the streets: long rows of tenement houses built one against the next, and wherever a neighbour was never built or has since come down, a tall blind gable wall of bare brick or grey render. Those walls are the raw material of Galeria Urban Forms, and in 2011 they started to fill up.

A foundation and a competition

The project grew out of a small organisation founded in October 2008 by Teresa Latuszewska-Syrda to support street art, which took the name Fundacja Urban Forms at the start of 2010. The idea of a permanent outdoor gallery came up at a seminar held in June 2009 at the Muzeum Sztuki, the city’s museum of modern art and one of the oldest anywhere, built on a collection the avant-garde a.r. group gave the city around 1930, and the first walls went up that summer. One of them, on Piotrkowska Street, backed the city’s bid to become European Capital of Culture.

Latuszewska-Syrda’s plan was to treat the enormous gables along Zachodnia Street and Kościuszki Avenue as exhibition space for large painting, a gallery with no roof and no opening hours. In 2011 the city launched a competition to develop the concept, the foundation won it, and Galeria Urban Forms 2011 was the result.

The choice of walls also connects with local history. Łódź kept a good number of the hand-painted advertisements that covered its gables between the 1960s and the 1980s, faded slogans for state firms and products. Painting big images on the sides of buildings was already part of how the city looked. The foundation’s pitch was to pick that tradition up again with contemporary artists.

The 2011 walls

The festival ran through the summer, one or two walls at a time.

• June: Sat One from Munich and Etam Cru, the Łódź duo of Bezt and Sainer, painted Bang on Kościuszki 27, a falling boy that quickly became the image most people associated with the project.
• July: Kenor from Barcelona, whose work is all interlocking geometric colour, took Kościuszki 32 on the other side of the avenue.
• August: M-City, the Gdańsk stencil artist whose walls are crowded with cranes, factories and machines, painted Legionów 19. Remed, a French painter working from Spain, took Próchnika 11, and the Polish pair Sepe and Chazme painted next door at Próchnika 9. Etam Cru, painting on home ground, added further pieces around the city over the summer.
• September: Aryz, the young Barcelona painter whose huge, soft-toned figures had become familiar at festivals across Europe, closed the season on Pomorska 67.

Kościuszki Avenue, with a wall on each side, was the nearest thing to a centre. The rest were spread across the streets north of it, so seeing them all meant walking the city rather than visiting one site.

Why it caught the eye

It helped that the walls were so big, and so plain before. A lot of mural festivals at the time worked on low walls or temporary boards. Łódź offered five- and six-storey gables in the middle of a city that visitors rarely thought of, and the paintings turned dull stretches of street into something people went out of their way to see.

The mix of artists was also well judged. Two of the local names, Etam Cru and M-City, were already travelling abroad, so the project read as Polish painters hosting their international peers rather than a line-up flown in. And the works were intended to stay. Plenty of festival walls are painted over within a season or two; these were commissioned as a permanent collection, with the foundation publishing addresses and dates so they could be found and mapped.

Outside Poland the first response, on blogs and in magazines, was mostly simple pleasure at seeing long runs of grey wall carrying colour and form, some of it very good.

The foundation keeps a dated chronology of its work, from the 2008 founding to each festival edition, on its own calendar page.

Since then the foundation has kept adding walls, and Łódź now counts well over a hundred murals.