Guido Van Helten’s Giant Murals Feature East-European Textile Patterns

Minsk, the capital of Belarus, was recently taken over by street art festival Urban Myths. For this festival, artists had to explore the city for three days, plunge into the city’s atmosphere and then create original paintings based on urban folklore. After studying the locals and their traditions, British-Australian artist Guido Van Helten chose to paint a girl dressed in an embroidered red and white shirt. The red and white embroidery is a part of Eastern Europe culture, as it appears in Belarus’s national flag as well as in the citizen’s everyday clothing. Guido used the same pattern as seen in his previous piece for CityArt project in Kiev, Ukraine. On the 18-story building that he painted earlier in October, a Ukrainian woman is depicted wearing the same type of traditional embroidery as the one in Minsk. According to the CityArt team, Guido said he was inspired by the femininity and beauty that he finds in Ukrainian women.

Guido Van Helten’a work for the Urban Myths Project, supported by the British Embassy in Belarus, was painted at the Academy of the Belarusian state University of Culture where it is now on view.