Huge eye mural goes up by Prague airport

Visitors flying to or from Prague airport can now admire a huge colourful mural, one of the largest of its kind in Europe. The large-format wall painting was created by the well-known Czech graffiti artist Michal Škapa as part of a project called ArtWall.

The large-format mural Cosmos covers a warehouse of the company CTP in the immediate vicinity of Václav Havel Airport in Prague.

The painting, which took nearly three weeks to complete, covers a space of 5,250 square metres.

Its main motif is a large blue eye, which stares from one of the wall towards one of the airport’s runways.

Vladimír Strejček is director of the visual studio Drawetc, which initiated the project. He says this particular mural was more complicated than others.

Due to the safety restrictions at the airport, its creators were not allowed to use a nocturnal projector to transfer the design on the wall.

Instead, the sketch was transferred directly to the façade, with the help of three high-lift platforms, Mr. Strejček says.

“In this case, we created a system of points and based on that we made the main shapes on the wall. Afterwards, Michal Škapa and another five or six guys created the painting on the wall. They used almost 4,500 cans of spray, so it took a lot of material.”

The project, intended to transform some of the city’s grey industrial zones and brighten up the public space, originated in 2017.

“The mural scene has been thriving all around the world but there has been nothing much going on in the Czech Republic. So I decided to approach the developer CTP, because I know they have a lot of large buildings around the country.

“I showed them my concept and to my surprise, they liked it and so we announced a public competition for the murals.”

The two other murals that originated within the ArtWall project include a painting by Dutch artist Dzia, painted on a warehouse by the D1 motorway near the town of Humpolec.

The third work of art is a large-format sticker covering a warehouse hall in CTPark Pilsen, created by Kristina Fišerová, head of the master’s studio for graphic design at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art at the University of West Bohemia.

Drawetc is currently preparing a joint project with Prague city councillors, who approached the studio with a plan to transform some of the capital’s walls and houses, both in the city centre as well as in the outskirts.

“One of the places is close to Malostranská metro station. If you ride tram number 22 from Malostranská to Prague Castle, you can see walls all along the way.

“Nowadays, the walls are covered with illegal graffiti. The city councillors have asked us to create something that would correspond with the place, with the Prague Castle and its history.

“So this is just one small piece of a huge list of Prague buildings that could be transformed in the future.”