"In January 2014, as part of the St+Art Delhi street art festival, the headquarters of the Delhi Police was the site for an unprecedented collaboration between a government body and street art."
Hendrick ECB is a German street artist, and is known for his style of creating large scale portraits. He has made several artworks across the world, including a 70 metre long portrait of a fisherman in Busan, Asia's highest mural. He worked with Indian artist Anpu on a piece which would eventually be larger than 150 ft. The scale of the project was so huge that it required the tallest industrial crane available in india to complete it.
During the making of the piece, Hendrick and Anpu would go on top of a mosque across the road from the Police Headquarters to check on their progress and share notes on the way forward. Through the five days it took them to paint the piece, their reference was a small postcard sized image of the Mahatma.
Once finished, the piece stood 152 feet tall, and is widely recognised as India's tallest mural. It also represented a significant step forward in terms of cultural engagement between art and the government. A project of this scale proved that Indian public institutions are open minded and forward thinking.
"Watch the making of video of the Mahatma Gandhi Mural"
Curator + Photographs —Akshat Nauriyal