Kobra in Brasília

Who knows me already noticed how much I love street art. And thanks goodness Brasília has a lot of it!!

We already have some well known artists beautifully spreading their art on the grey, cold walls of the building and underground tunnels for pedestrians like Gurulino and Michelle Cunha. But that's a theme for another post. Here I would like to gladly present the artist from São Paulo named Kobra who has just painted a great, colorful - which is his signature - wall mural in Brasília!

Well, as stated on his website:

Whether traveling to New York, Moscow, or Los Angeles, pedestrians take notice of huge wall murals painted on predominant buildings, deemed artwork for the public. Portraits bigger than life with colorful spectrums and nostalgic reverence bare his signature. The extraordinary artist is Eduardo Kobra. Most people simply call him Kobra, raised in a low income neighborhood of San Paulo called Clear Field. Learn more here.

The 28-meter high mural in Brasília is located in the building of Caixa Cultural, in Brasília's downtown. It is a tribute to the Candangos, workers who come from all over the country to build up Brasília in the end of the 1950s. Indeed his photorealistic murals are detailed representations of eras past.

“My work nowadays is based on the use of old images of the cities I am painting. I visit museums, check the books and from there I come up with some images from the 20s or the 30s that show the architecture of the city. The idea of the murals is to recreate a city that no longer exists, do people who didn’t live in that time can see it and those who did live back then can have a moment of memory or nostalgia.” – Quote by Eduardo Kobra durring an interview on Artmiami.tv

Kobra's massively-scaled portraits are typically done on buldings, walls, and murals by freehand using a technique of repeating squares and triangles. The result is large-scale colorful murals infused with rainbow patterns that catch the eye of whoever passes by. This requires him and his assistants to ride a scaffolding 20 times a day up and down during the painting process.  

"When we are up there, we cannot have the exact idea of how the picture is developing,' explains the artist Agnaldo Brito, one of Kobra's crew members. 'That's why we have to go down, then have a look at the whole picture. Sometimes we even step back a bit far away from the painting to make sure there's no flaw in the way we're painting the nose, the anatomy... everything must be perfect'.

Kobra and his team has already painted in 4 other Brazilian cities, including the huge breathtaking wall mural in São Paulo after the architect Oscas Niemeyer, who died in 2012.

The team is heading now to Sweden, Poland, US, France, and Canada. They have already painted in Russia and New York.

You can check out his amazing work and process on his very active Flickr page as well as his own site.