Street art in Leuven
Walls Have Company
Murals share Leuven with brick, church towers, alleys, bicycles, and passing pedestrians rather than standing apart from the city.
- Place
- Leuven, Belgium
- Year
- 2025
- Sequence
- 7 main photographs · 7 details
Wall I
The collection steps outside
Leon Keer created this 3D mural on the SLAC art academy for Leuven's Dieric Bouts festival, arranging painted frames around real windows and extending the illusion through augmented reality. A passer-by returns the monumental facade to human scale.
Wall II
A different scale
Bisser's Verwarr(m)ing, made with 30CC and Youth For Climate, turns the familiar warning “Close that door, we are not heating the outside” into a deliberately useless monumental radiator. Small figures climb, carry, and argue around the absurd machine.
Details
The crowd, closer
The wide view establishes the impossible outdoor radiator. These closer frames reveal how Bisser's figures react to it, and how street signs and utility boxes become part of the climate-themed joke.
Wall III
Tower and dragon
The painted creature and the church tower share the skyline, bringing two kinds of city landmark into one view.
Details
Dragon, closer
Without the tower, the creature returns to the material of the wall: turquoise paint, weathered brick, flying shoes, and branches crossing the frame.
Wall IV
Optimistic Gepetto
Painted in a Leuven courtyard, Bisser's Optimistic Gepetto reimagines Geppetto, the carpenter from Pinocchio, making small figures marked with mathematical signs. Those bearing a plus sign are shown as complete, each receiving a final piece, while the painted workshop shares the space with real doors, lamps, tables, and chairs.
Wall V
Across the bays
Bisser's Blue Cat and birds forms one composition across the concrete bays, its three characters refusing the architecture that contains them.
Details
Blue Cat and birds
The cat and its two bird companions belong to one mural rather than a loose bestiary. These close views separate the characters only long enough to reveal how their different marks and colours work together across the garage-box walls.
Wall VI
Sanda Dia, remembered
German street artist Case Maclaim painted this portrait of Sanda Dia on KU Leuven's Pieter De Somer auditorium in 2022. Initiated by Dia's friends, the mural remembers the twenty-year-old student who died in 2018 after a hazing ritual by the Reuzegom fraternity.