Muralopolis, como Łódź se ha convertido en "el paraiso del graffiti" sobre la tierra

In the spring of 2014, boredpanda.com, a portal devoted to visual arts and design published a list of 20 global centres of urban art. Łódź ranked second, just behind New York.

The city of Łódź, which used to be the centre of the European textile industry, was captured on film by Andrzej Wajda (a Łódź National Film School alumni) in The Promised Land. Łódź can boldly claim to be one of the artistic hubs of Poland. Although no longer host to Camerimage, in the public's memory it is still a cradle for the best Polish directors and cinematographers. At the beginning of the 19th century, Łódź was one of the Europe's biggest and fastest-growing centres for the textile industry, which created a new identity for the city. It used to be called "a promised land" and "a city of many cultures" (Łódź is a host of  Dialogue of Four Coultures Festival). Today, thanks to a process of revitalization and an atmosphere conducent to creativity, Łódź has come to be a city of modern technologies, creative enterprises and grand events. The main asset of the city is its dynamic cultural development in the fields of design, fashion, film, and other audiovisual arts. Łódź's reputation stems from the many successes in the arena of international film by Polish directors and cinematographers who graduated from the most notable academy for future actors, directors, photographers, camera operators and TV staff in Poland - The Leon Schiller National Film, Television and Theatre School​in Łódź . Early students of the National Film School included the directors Andrzej Munk, Andrzej Wajda, Kazimierz Karabasz, Roman Polanski, Janusz Morgenstern, who, at the end of the 50s, became famous as the founders of the Polish Film School.

Bigger than Banksy

The already multifaceted city of Łódź has been revealing yet another interesting feature - it has come to be the Polish capital of street art. One of the greatest contributors to the aesthetic changes of the cityscape is the Urban Forms Foundation, created in 2009 by art historian Michał Bieżyński and actress Teresa Latuszewska-Syrda. It's main project is the Urban Forms Gallery, which is a permanent street art exhibition in the public spaces of Łódź. The gallery's mission is to "saturate the cityscape with creative, multilayered and modern art that improves the current image of Łódź and gives it artistic value. The main tool to reach that aim is large format paintings done directly on the sides of buildings". 

In the future, the project is to be enriched with other pieces of urban art -  sculptures, installations, and "street jewellery". Meanwhile, the gallery's collection of murals is continuously growing. Once a year, the Urban Forms Gallery organizes a festival attracting artists from all around the world.

In 2012, the prestigious French magazine Graffiti Art included the festival among the 5 most important street-art events worldwide. At the end of 2013, CNN produced a series called On the Road: Poland. The episode devoted to murals in Łódź was strikingly titled Bigger than Banksy. Many well-known portals wrote about Urban Forms, such as graffuturism.com, streetartnews.net, unurth.com or brooklynstreetart.com, and the photos from Łódź spread to Vietnamese web portals.

In the spring of 2014, boredpanda.com, a portal devoted to visual arts and design published a list of 20 global centres of urban art. Łódź ranked second, just behind New York, beating metropolises such as London, Mexico City, Prague, Berlin, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Paris, Melbourne, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, and the Chilean Mecca of street art, Valparaiso.

The artists participating in the project are considered to be the best in the field of street art and they hail from three continents and eight countries: Poland, Brazil, Chile, France, Germany, Australia and Belgium. Among the most renowned are Os Gemeos, Inti, Aryz, M-City, Etam Crew, Otecki, Sepe and Chazme.