This mural on 2nd of December Street in Satwa is by the German artist known as 1010, painted in 2016 for the first phase of the Dubai Street Museum, the Brand Dubai and Dubai Municipality project curated by Rom Levy of StreetArtNews and Sanaz Askari of MINE Gallery.
1010, who works anonymously and is associated with the Hamburg scene, is internationally known for a single, striking illusion: concentric bands of graded colour, painted with hard edges in nested organic shapes, which read as an impossibly deep cavity opening into the surface. The effect turns a flat facade into what appears to be a portal or abyss, and depends on precise control of colour value and edge to sustain the depth from a distance.
Among the sixteen murals of the project's first phase — dominated by figurative heritage imagery — his contribution is purely optical, offering an abstract counterpoint on a residential wall in one of the city's oldest neighbourhoods.
Exhibo editorial
Everything else on this street is a picture of something. 1010 painted a hole.
It shouldn't work — concentric bands of colour on a flat wall — but the edges are so exact that your eye refuses the evidence and insists there's a cavity there, metres deep, opening into the building. People walk up and put a hand out to check. That's the whole trick and the whole pleasure of it, and on a street devoted to falcons, abras and founding fathers, the wall that simply appears to have been punctured is a welcome piece of nonsense.
How to find it
The 1010 mural is on a wall along 2nd of December Street (formerly Al Diyafah Street) in Satwa. Look for the abstract piece of nested, graded colour bands — the depth illusion is strongest viewed straight on from a few metres back, and flattens noticeably if you approach at an angle.
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