How a site fence became an artwork

“Boa Mistura” is Portuguese and means “good mixture”. When I first witnessed this Madrid-based artist collective painting at an art festival in Belgrade, I was thrilled by the way they created urban art. It wasn’t only that the colours were “well mixed” (true to their name) and that it was fascinating to watch an artwork being created before one’s eyes. It was also interesting to see four guys, who have meanwhile expanded their team, go about their work with passion and joy. Their large-scale murals and powerful messages have attracted attention in many cities around the world, including Bogotá, Mexico City, São Paulo and New York. In 2017 I worked with them in Vienna where they were busy designing the site fence in front of the Hofburg for the soon-to-be-opened Weltmuseum. They had already been in Berlin in the early 2000s when they painted the message “I love Berlin” on the facade of the East Side Hotel in Friedrichshain. The mural was replaced by a billboard advertisement shortly thereafter. But now there was another occasion to present their work in Berlin again – and not just once, but three times.

At the end of the Bauhaus centennial in 2019, Boa Mistura created their first commissioned work for us. It was inspired by Walter Gropius and his catchphrase: “Modern housing for modern people” from 1930, the title of an essay in which Gropius calls to unite modern life and modern living. At a time when many flats were still designed in styles of earlier eras, he advocated functional apartment furnishings “in clear, concise and basic forms which correspond to the rhythm of modern life”. More than 100 years later, this goal is as relevant as ever for designers who continue to shape our environment in response to current challenges. Boa Mistura based the typography of their first artwork on the ITC Bauhaus font, created by Herbert Bayer in 1926. According to the artists, “we wanted to distance ourselves from the conventional scripts and create something original that would fit to the Bauhaus-Archiv”.

Their second work, created in 2020 and now on display at Klingelhöferstraße, is dedicated to the second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer. His motto “Construction and design are one” also featured Bauhaus-inspired typography based on Josef Albers’s combination typescript from 1928. As its name implies, the script is based on a combination of basic shapes (circle, quarter circle, square), from which Albers developed a series of ten standard elements. The colours are derived from Gunta Stölzl’s fabric designs.

“The Bauhaus artists are the mothers and fathers of our creative universe,” says Boa Mistura. The Bauhaus is the reference point for their art and has indirectly influenced many of their past works. The artists from Madrid acknowledge that “it is a great gift, but also a responsibility to work with the tools these masters have left behind.”

A third artwork by Boa Mistura, dedicated to the legacy of Mies van der Rohe, will be unveiled shortly before the grand reopening of the Bauhaus-Archiv in 2025. For more information on Boa Mistura, visit their website www.boamistura.com.