46-Ft-Tall Mural Expresses Balance of Strength, Fragility, & Resilience

Every year for the past decade, the Alpine city of Grenoble, in southeastern France, becomes a beacon for street art. That annual transformation is thanks in large part to the Street Art Festival of Grenoble, which, since 2015, has brought more than 400 murals to the city by artists from around the world. For this year’s edition, the UK-based duo SNIK unveiled Flourish, their newest and, in many ways, most technically complex artwork to date.

At 14 meters tall (about 46 feet tall), Flourish demanded tremendous patience and care to complete. The mural depicts a woman with a tangle of flowers draped over her face, which has been rendered in an etched style. Her gaze is firm, staring directly ahead, and vibrant bursts of pink and blue hues surround her like a thin fog. With its graphic lines and pops of color, the entire composition seems meticulously layered, and yet it was created as a single-layer stencil, hand-cut over several weeks.

“With only one layer to work with, there’s nowhere to hide,” Nik Ellis of SNIK tells My Modern Met. “Every detail, every edge, every fade of color had to be deliberate. The scale alone made it a challenge—painting a face of that size while still trying to capture something delicate in the expression.”

Despite pushing SNIK “technically and physically,” Flourish maintains an air of ease and clarity, perfectly complementing its urban surroundings. But, Ellis cautions, street art is nevertheless temporary, a “quiet reminder that things change,” reminiscent of the blooming and subsequent decay of a flower. It’s exactly that juxtaposition between renewal and ephemerality that compels SNIK—and why botanic motifs felt so crucial to incorporate throughout Flourish.

“Surrounded by foliage and florals, it feels like she’s both emerging from something and being reclaimed by it,” Ellis explains. “Blooms grow, fade, then disappear. That tension between strength and fragility has always been a big part of our work.”

Another significant—and inherent—aspect of street art is, as Ellis adds, the connection between a piece and its local community. While working in Grenoble, people in the neighborhood “came out every day to watch [us work], ask questions, bring food, or just check in,” the artist says. “From a distance, [Flourish] catches the eye, but it’s also rooted in place—the colors, the figure, the organic shapes feel like they’re meant to be there.”

As for what Ellis would like audiences to take away from the mural: “Hopefully, it gives the people who walk past it every day something a bit different—a moment to pause.”

To learn more about the artists behind Flourish, visit SNIK’s website.

The UK-based art duo SNIK has unveiled their latest mural, Flourish, for this year’s Street Art Festival of Grenoble.

As a single-layer stencil, Flourish is one of SNIK’s most ambitious and complex murals to date, meditating upon themes of fragility, renewal, and resilience.

SNIK: Website | Instagram | Facebook

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by SNIK.

Related Articles:

Street Artist Brings Vibrant Array of Marine Life to the Busy Streets of Manhattan

Artist Uses Local Resident To Capture the Spirit of Brixton in New Mural

Street Artist Captures the Chaos of Life Through Vibrant, Expressive Murals

Street Art Festival Breathes New Life Into Semi-Abandoned Italian Town

This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.