See the true Zagreb on this metropolis tour with road artists

Krešimir Golubić remembers his break into Zagreb’s street-art scene. He’d honed his craft in Berlin earlier than returning to the capital in 1992. “We had the war. It was terrible. Everyone had guns and I had a spraycan. So I wrote ‘Who are you?’ in English next to my tag. A street artist wrote ‘Who are you?’ beside that, so we met. It was like Facebook on a wall.”

After an hour with Krešimir, one among Croatia’s main road artists — a co-founder of the Zagreb Street Art Festival, who paints underneath the pseudonym Leon GSK — I’m beginning to see Zagreb anew. Look past the good-looking Austro-Hungarian structure and the town’s streets are a vigorous dialog peppered with in-jokes and wonder.

On the central hub of Ban Jelačić Square, a person turns the deal with of a barrel organ, surrounded by onlookers. Krešimir crosses as an alternative to a scruffy nook of Tkalčićeva Street off the sq.. It has paste-up artworks of a strutting purple fish and a lady with a mop of orange hair holding a spraycan. A stencilled woman throws a Molotov cocktail of love-hearts. A lamp-post is a kaleidoscope of multicoloured stickers. To insiders like Krešimir, such “interventions” are artists’ calling playing cards; the purple fish is an icon of Italian artist Merioone, for instance. That isn’t the purpose, although.

Now graffiti is hung in galleries, you neglect its unique energy to precise one thing about its neighborhood. Krešimir’s tour returns it to the wild the place it belongs. It’s artwork as safari. “Street art is raw,” he says. “What you see in galleries doesn’t have the same energy of an intervention like this.” He’s pointing to a mayonnaise bottle caught excessive up on a wall. It’s a reference to an idea art work by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan that duct-taped a banana to a wall. “After we joined the euro [in 2023] prices went crazy. Everything was madness. This is the mayonnaise that became like art because of the cost. I really like this.”

Though official murals have been painted in communist Yugoslavia within the Sixties and 70s, Zagreb was the primary place in Eastern Europe to undertake the street-style graffiti of New York in 1983. Krešimir explains: “It has always been the most progressive city, economically and artistically.” But in Nineteen Eighties Yugoslavia, the authorities hardly smiled on iconoclasts. Early sprayers risked a beating from police or jail. Now Zagreb is sort of pleased with its road artists.

We go down an alley, previous a mosaic with ‘Nazovi svoju Mamu’ (Call your mom) set in broken asphalt — the work of Frenchman Ememem — to search out dancing skeletons, a masked woman with swirling hair, a carefully stencilled geisha and a cartoonish teenager in outsized trainers. This is Pri Nami backyard bar, a semi-derelict courtyard that hosts the worldwide Zagreb Street Art competition. Even whereas occupied by gen-Zers with laptops, the cafe has a countercultural cool distinct from surrounding streets.

Moving on, we head up Tkalčićeva Street, its pastel baroque homes now occupied by bars and cafes. The extra I look, the extra I see: a Warhol-esque Campbell soup tin labelled Media’s Fear Soup; a light mural of a pair with turkey heads on craft brewery Medvedgrad, one of many first business works within the metropolis; a ship whose wake trails throughout the pavement. There’s additionally a paste-up of inventor Nikola Tesla with a purple mohican — one among Krešimir’s. “He was the first punk rocker, because of his avant garde ideas and way of thinking,” he explains.

We reduce away up some steps and slip by way of an archway into Park Opatovina. It’s an oasis of sudden calm after the bar road — an extended rectangle of grass and bushes the place previous folks sit on sunny benches and younger mums chat beside excited tots in a playground. And there’s road artwork. Beside a large denim-clad Gulliver being roped by cartoon males who leap from a e book, the park partitions are painted with a lounge and a crazily tiled rest room. Beneath it’s written ‘Nekome je park doma’ (For some the park is residence) — a touch upon homelessness by Zagreb road artist Boris Bare.

Outside historic Lower Town, road artwork provides strategy to traditional graffiti street-writing. At Pierottijeva Street, we slide open an industrial door sprayed ‘Medika’ and are hit by a blast of graffitied color. A derelict former pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, Medika is the wellspring of Zagreb road artwork, a cultural centre of galleries and grungy weekend golf equipment that’s non-profit and undoubtedly non-governmental. Krešimir grows nostalgic: “This has a feeling of my teenage years. It’s punk energy. It’s a really important place for people who don’t fit into mainstream culture. Every weekend there’s something new.” It’s a renegade aspect to Zagreb that’s at odds with its historic seems to be. But maybe it’s time to admire the town’s residing historical past, too.