Dubai · City Walk
Ben Eine Typography, City Walk
Bold letterforms set high on a wall by the artist whose work a British prime minister gave to the White House.
This typographic work at City Walk is by the British artist Ben Eine, created for the inaugural Dubai Walls project in March 2016.
Eine is one of the leading figures of the British street art movement and is known almost exclusively for letters: bold, brightly coloured, carefully constructed alphabets and words painted at architectural scale, often running across shopfront shutters and building facades. His reputation reached an unusual level of officialdom when a signature Eine work was chosen by Prime Minister David Cameron as a gift to the White House and President Barack Obama.
For Dubai Walls, Eine claimed a position high up on a wall in the City Walk district for his signature typographical piece — the lettering placed above the flow of the street rather than at eye level, so that it reads across the district from a distance.
Exhibo editorial
Eine only paints letters, and he has painted them well enough that one of his works ended up as a diplomatic gift from Downing Street to the White House. That's a strange career for someone who started out putting alphabets on shop shutters at dawn.
Here he took the high ground — the piece sits well above head height, so you read it the way you read signage, from across the district rather than up close. Amid a project full of faces and figures, the wall that just says something in enormous, confident letterforms is oddly the one that holds. Look up when you enter.
How to find it
Ben Eine's typographic piece is set high on a wall within the City Walk district on Al Safa Street — look upward rather than at eye level. The bold, brightly coloured letterforms read best from a distance across the pedestrian zone.
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