Minsk in Street Art News Top Ten
On December 4, Street Art News, an online guide to the world of street art, posted its monthly compilation of the best street art pieces in the world. The November top ten includes a piece by Guido Van Helten, an Australian contemporary artist, who specializes in large–scale, site–specific mural works, which he created in Minsk. His work is listed at the 8th position.
Guido painted the mural in Minsk for the Urban Myths project. The impressive work shows a girl in a vyshyvanka, the Old East Slavic traditional shirt with the elements of ethnic embroidery, and can be seen on Rabkorovskaya Street, 15, in the city center.
Van Helten had spent a week in Belarus before he started working on his piece in the beginning of November. He had done a profound research on the Belarusian culture, studied people, visited museums, and read a number of books to get an idea how to combine the old traditions with the contemporary ones. The result is a girl wearing modern clothes with a vyshyvanka worn underneath. Van Helten’s vyshyvanka is based on a real shirt, which is over a hundred years.
At the moment, the Urban Myths project is on hold because of the cold weather in Belarus, but it will be continued next year in spring, with more artists from such countries as Italy, Spain, and Russia arriving in Minsk to create more street art works.
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