Serbian artist unveils new mural on Brussels street art trail

The City of Brussels' street art parcours keeps growing, now numbering more than 120 works adorning façades and pavements across the city.

Every year, the music and culture festival Balkan Trafik! invites a street artist from the Balkans to create a piece of street art in Brussels. This year Serbian artist Jana Danilović has produced a mural entitled Up! in the Marolles neighbourhood.

A street arts theorist and holder of a PhD in art, her work adorns the streets of Bosnia, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Montenegro, Serbia - and now Brussels.

For this work, she has emphasised the positive. Up! is a mural design inspired and based upon several universally recognisable symbols and motifs.

"Birds are here used as the main motif, symbolising freedom," she told The Bulletin. "Swallows, in particular, are tender, peaceful and playful creatures, but despite their seeming fragility they endure thousands of miles of flights.

"A colourful background, based on the interaction of coloured surfaces and patterns, provides the design with vibrancy and rhythm, making it dynamic and playful. Pale blue surfaces stand for the sky, another universal symbol – limitless and optimistic.

"The general idea of this design is to provide the space upon which it is placed with a fresh but not imposing palate, as well as to illustrate the empowering message that no matter how seemingly small and fragile an individual may be, there are no limits to how high one can go or what can be achieved."

The mural is on the garden side of Rue Terre-Neuve 132 in downtown Brussels.