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 Schoolin 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.
