Storhaug Part 1 – Tou

Over the years, the surrounding industrial buildings have hosted hundreds of small-scale interventions as well as large-scale murals from some of the scenes leading names. It is a natural starting point for street art tours where you’ll find everything from sticker art, to graffiti, stencil art and muralism.

[click on an artwork title, top left, for further details about a piece]

Blek Le Rat is a French artist whose plague of stencilled rats have graced cities world-wide since 1981, beginning with his hometown in Paris. He is an influential early figure in the field of street art, and is often called the father of stencil-art.

Heavily influenced by the NYC graffiti scene of the 1970s, Blek Le Rat was also classically trained in various printmaking techniques and in architecture. Describing rats as “the only free animal in the city” Blek Le Rat’s name adopts "rat" as a subversive anagram for “art.”

MIR is a Bergen based stencil artist who was prolific in the burgeoning street art scene of the early 2000s. Erupting from the same school and period as his Norwegian contemporaries Dolk, Pøbel, Strøk and Martin Whatson, MIR is well known for his mostly two-toned, classic graphic stencil work.

His pieces are easily recognised in Stavanger by the locals who grew up with his visual take on social injustice, as he often tackled difficult subjects with a level of sensitivity rarely present in this medium.

Julio Anaya Cabanding (ES)

Spanish artist Julio Anaya Cabanding paints replicas on found objects in public locations of well known and cherished artworks, meticulously mimicking masterpieces from the Renaissance period through to the Impressionist movement and beyond.

By leaving his studio and actively seeking out contrasting environments for his paintings, Cabanding’s artwork allows the iconic masterpieces he replicates to transcend the hallowed halls of the museums and galleries the originals inhabit.


For his time at Nuart Festival in Stavanger, Cabanding selected works from Lars Hertevig, one of Norway’s most well known artists, as his subject matter.

UK based artist duo SNIK use their visual platform to tell stories about the everyday beauty that surrounds us, often by paying close attention to the details; a fold of fabric, a lock of hair, all meticulously recorded.

They are staunch traditionalists, cutting the massive, multi-layered stencils that create the base of their work by hand, in a painstaking process that leaves a unique and almost photographic quality to their work, like a ripple in a mirror.

Pushing the artform to its boundary and recognised for their discipline, SNIK hold a unique place in the Urban Art movement.

Portuguese artist Bordalo II creates work under this name as a tribute to his grandfather, fine artist Real Bordalo, whose studio he grew up in. Heavily influenced by his own graffiti background coupled with 8 years of study in a higher level fine arts environment, Bordalo II now creates curbside 3D murals and installations.

Cobbled together out of found objects and laced with paint, Bordalo II turns trash into large animals, leaving us to think about the impact of our pollution on the natural world, while leaving his unique fingerprint on the urban art scene.

Known for his minimal, sociopolitical and and often spontaneous public pieces, Italian artist Vlady created a series of works in Stavanger during the 2018 edition of Nuart.

Conceptual to their core, Vlady’s works are often text based and teasingly sarcastic, reminding us of the intangible, yet very real pitfalls in the fabric of our built environments.

Spurred on by social and environmental issues, American artist John Fekner relentlessly campaigned through the five boroughs of NYC with his ‘Warning Signs’ and later ‘Word Signs’ projects during the 1970s and 1980s.

Using spray paint, he wrote out words, signs and symbols to shine a light on environments, buildings and structures which had been left to decay, creating hazardous conditions for locals. In doing so, Fekner hoped to lead city officials, agencies and residential communities to be more responsible and to take action.

His work represented a distinct category from other graffiti on the streets of NYC at the time, which led public figures such as John Russell of the New York Times to comment that, “John Fekner is an artist who works not only in New York but with New York.”

Bringing her fighting spirit to Stavanger to educate and inspire, university professor Bahia Shehab shows us how her art came to live on our streets with a message of resistance during the Egyptian revolution.

“Art is wonderful, it inspires, but it does not push for action sometimes… If you really want change, which is what we need, at least in my part of the world, we need to do more than just art.”

Translated to “How Big is The Idea”, Shehab’s mural in Stavanger is based on the third stanza of a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, which reads in full, "How vast is the revolution, How narrow is the journey, How big is the idea, How small is the state".

The eagle-eyed viewer will notice a smaller text stencilled to the left of the larger piece. It is here that Shehab has written the fourth stanza: "how small is the state" in a poetic illustration of the power of ideas and activism to overcome the kind of civil oppression she witnesses on a daily basis in her home town of Cairo in Egypt.

Portugal's ±MAISMENOS± joined the local election campaign and presented his political manifesto at Nuart Festival 2017.

Spanish visual artist Jofre Oliveras utilizes a spectrum of mediums to create his murals, sculptures and installations. For Jofre, art is a tool that highlights the need for change at both an individual and a societal level.

His work uses satire to critique problematic social convictions through sculptural and conceptual interventions, alongside his own meticulously executed murals in public space.

You can find French duo Ella & Pitr’s Giants, a series of illustrated comic-book stylised characters playfully snoozing their way around the globe, adorning rooftops, runways, homes, shipping containers and even fields.

In 2019 they claimed a world record for the largest outdoor mural with a piece in Paris, beating out their initial record breaking mural created in Stavanger in 2015 which saw two of their characters cradling each other across a series of rooftops.

Fine artists and Iranian brothers, ICY & SOT have elevated the urban art scene over the years with their social, political and ecologically focused artworks, scattered across the globe. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, the artists are in constant pursuit of the mediums that will give their ideas the greatest resonance – whether it be chain link fences, barbed wire, old rusty shovels, or oil cans.

Through their unique visual language and powerful, often site-specific works, ICY & SOT’s work discusses global issues including equal rights, imprisonment, the plights of migrants and refugees, climate change and the pitfalls of capitalism.

The artists have received international recognition with their ability to transform difficult conversations and global affairs into highly engaging visual work.

Welsh cartoonist and illustrator Phlegm has been bringing his self-published comic books to life for the past decade. Preferring to paint in run down environments, his towering, almost-human characters interact with the built world around them in humorous and surreal ways.

Phlegm’s work gives us a glimpse into a world that is not unlike our own, yet is filled with strange contraptions more common to steam-punk fantasy and the minds of dreamers; flying cars, endless networks of cogs, unreal robotics, and towers with a few too many turrets to be accurate.

Hand painted in strictly monochrome, Phlegm’s artwork can be found in cities across the globe.

Well known in the early Greek urban art scene, Alexandros Vasmoulakis / Vasmou is a contemporary painter with a background in advertising. He has a series of large pieces dotted about Athens in prominent areas, binding his aesthetic with the city itself.

Having undergone a stylistic shift in more recent years towards abstraction, this piece from 2010 is a reflection of the work he is still well known for in street art culture.

Here Vasmou adopts a more figurative approach, utilizing enlarged features to evoke a dramatised sense of what human emotions may lie beneath his character’s skin. His public work mirrors the paper collages he makes solely out of newsprint – both are driven by human nature, and his own state of mind on any given day.