The heart at Grønland: street art on a famous Oslo wall

Some walls you see every time you walk past, whether you want to or not. The end wall at Grønlandsleiret 6 in Gamle Oslo is one of them. When I realised which wall I was going to paint, it felt huge. It became the biggest wall I had painted at that point.

A heart of cubes

The motif is a heart built from Rubik's cubes on a dark background. I painted it in autumn 2020, in the middle of the pandemic and after a year when Black Lives Matter set the agenda around the world. I felt helpless. That we need a movement like that in 2020 is simply awful. The heart is my way of saying that we stand together, even when we have to keep our distance.

Brush and roller, not spray

The building is protected, so the spray can was swapped for rollers and brushes. A professional firm prepared the wall before I started, and the painting itself took three days. The scaffolding stood on the roof of the building next door. I am afraid of heights, and on one of the days I walked 22,000 steps up and down that scaffolding.

Artistic freedom

The project came from Privatmegleren Gamle Oslo, who gave me complete artistic freedom, and the residents said yes. It is not every day a company dares to take a stand like that. Avisa Oslo and Vårt Oslo both wrote about the wall.

Why I paint walls

Shaping the cityscape and making people stop for a second, forget what they are thinking about and see something else: that is the best thing I know. You will find the heart at Grønlandsleiret 6 in Gamle Oslo. More of my walls are under Outside.