M-City

Street artist Mariusz Waras’ works are splayed across the facades of buildings in the streets of Warsaw, Gdańsk, Berlin, Paris, Budapest, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Jakarta, Bolzano, London and Prague as part of the m-city project. His murals may also be seen in art galleries in Poland and abroad, such as The Power of Fantasy in Brussel’s BOZAR in 2011. With urban landscapes as their main motif, m-city murals have a specific, recognisable style. Black and white Lego-like forms and shapes of modular, anonymous and similar houses stand in dense agglomerations portrayed from a distance. With the help of stencils, images of never ending cities are spray painted onto empty facades, bridge pillars, staircases, alleys, underground passages, metro stations. Art critic Bożena Czubak writes, "with its anarchistic stylistic and the inclusion of bottom-up initiatives, the m-city project rejects the utopian visions of the ideal perfectly planned city. […] It portrays the true face of cities - places of social and political conflicts." The depicted agglomerations appears to be living organisms that are multiplying like bacterial binary fission. In certain murals, the dense agglomerations form an altogether different image: the shape of a bomb or the symbol of eternity. Other themes often featuring in the murals are means of transportation – airplanes, trams, boats (Sopot, Praga), steamships, Zeppelins (Ljubljana), trains (Warsaw, Los Angeles) and flying saucer (Berlin); as well as cartoon characters. Mostly integrated with the surrounding architecture and the façade on which it is featured, the murals blend in to the urban landscape. But given the portrayal of the extreme form of urban life, they invite the viewer to re-question his perception of the surrounding.