Untitled, 2006
Blu + Ericailcane
Blu and Ericailcane use pseudonyms and rank internationally among the best-known street artists (in 2011, The Guardian included Blu in a list of the world’s ten best street artists). Their first works appeared in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Bologna (most of them disappeared in 2016, when Blu reacted to their detachment from the public sphere for exhibition purposes by removing most of his wall paintings).
Over the years, both artists have created artworks around the globe: from Guatemala to Germany, from Great Britain to Palestine.
Blu and Ericailcane have collaborated closely from the outset, creating diverse, mostly large-format “four-handed” murals.
The mural on Passeirer Gasse alley in the heart of Meran’s old town was commissioned by Kunst Meran-Merano Arte for the Sound Zero project (curated by Valerio Dehò), and was overseen by Gudrun De Chirico.
The artwork shows the ways in which the two artists and their styles interact and complement each other. Both display a great deal of drawing precision in their depictions of eerie and grotesque figures: reminiscent of people in Blu’s case, who designed the right part of the wall painting with its black outlines of figures on a white background, and evoking animals in the left part, represented by Ericailcane using the opposite color combination.
Some parts of the mural have since been damaged.