Street art legend paints 40-metre Abu Dhabi Wall

He’s worked with Banksy. He’s designed for Louis Vuttion. His work adorns the walls of the White House. And now the street artist known as Eine has taken on the UAE.

One of street art’s most prolific pioneers, Ben Eine, travelled to Abu Dhabi this week to paint a 40-metre perimeter wall of the British Embassy. The project, in conjunction with the British Council and aided by students from Zayed University, saw the wall decorated in typical Eine style: a typography made famous when he painted the entire alphabet from A to Z on shop shutters down Middlesex Street in East London’s trendy Shoreditch neighbourhood.

Sheikh Nahyan bin Mubarak al-Nahyan joined UK Ambassador to the UAE Philip Parham and British Council Country Director, Marc Jessel, to inaugurate the wall, which saw Eine guide royalty and the diplomat in the art of spraying graffiti.

Eine is a long way from his humble beginnings as an anti-social vandal, illegally tagging walls in his native UK. Arrested between 15 and 20 times and convicted five time for criminal damage, he narrowly escaped a prison sentence – but took with him a past that has motivated him to take his art from local streets to galleries worldwide.

“When I first got into graffiti, I thought it was going to change the world. But when, 20-years-later, it still hadn’t. I got bored of the self-imposed rules,” Eine told the Independent last December.

“Then, street art came around and it just excited me that you could do anything: posters, stickers, sculpture, site-specific responses. I really liked the way artists worked with their environment in clever ways. So I hooked up with Banksy and that was that.” 

One-time Banksy partner-in-crime, Eine, rose to international prominence after Samantha Cameron, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s wife, gave US President Barack Obama an original Eine painting as a gift on a state visit to the US. Prices for his work soared and luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton got in touch via Instagram, leading to Eine collaborating with the high-end fashion label.

Eine’s painting on the wall spells out ‘BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER’, a comment on the juxtaposition of traditional and modern that encapsulates the region. He said on Thursday that he hopes that his work will inspire a new generation of artists in the region to pick up the spray can hoping to “inspire the next generation of artists in the same way that the discovery of Subway art inspired me all those years ago and changed the course of my life.”

His debut Dubai solo show Hand in Hand opens on Monday at the Dubai gallery ARTSPACE ahead of international art fair Art Dubai 2015.

“We are excited to be bringing the UK’s most prolific and original urban artist to the UAE and to create cross-cultural awareness by engaging people with public art, whether it is inside the gallery or out,” Maliha Al Tabari of ARTSPACE said.

The UAE seems to have been bitten by the street art bug. Last November, the city entered the The Guinness World Record book for the world's longest graffiti scroll, a 2,245.40 metre artwork painted by 170 graffiti’s from around the world at Jumeirah Beach in Dubai. Although street art is being officially embraced, graffiti artists in the region can face arrest for defacing walls, streets or public buildings.