If you have walked around Barcelona and come across a huge mural featuring strange-looking characters and a muted colour palette, you may have been looking at a work by Aryz. The Catalan artist has become one of the most recognisable names in contemporary urban art thanks to his large-scale figurative compositions and his highly personal approach to painting.

But who is Aryz really, and where can you see his works? His career began on the streets of Barcelona and, over the years, has evolved into an artistic practice that combines muralism, painting, drawing and printmaking.

Who is Aryz, the artist behind the large-scale murals?

Aryz is the artistic name of Octavi Serra Arrizabalaga, born in Palo Alto, California, in 1988 and educated at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Barcelona. He began painting graffiti in the early 2000s around Barcelona and soon started to stand out for his large-scale interventions.

During his early years, Aryz found abandoned factories, industrial buildings and large walls to be the perfect spaces in which to experiment. His monumental characters, usually represented through desaturated colours and an aesthetic somewhere between the realistic and the fantastical, quickly gained international recognition.

Although Aryz is often associated with graffiti, reducing his career to graffiti alone would be an oversimplification. The artist has taken his visual language far beyond urban culture, developing an important studio practice in which he experiments with painting, collage, lithography and printmaking.

Since 2019, in fact, he has devoted an increasing part of his practice to studio work, reducing the number of murals he creates in order to explore his ideas and creative processes in greater depth.

Aryz’s style: from graffiti to contemporary art

One of the most recognisable characteristics of Aryz’s street art is his representation of the human figure. His characters often appear in impossible positions, fragmented or layered on top of one another, as though different images had been frozen at the same moment.

Classical painting references coexist in his work with elements rooted in urban culture. This combination allows his pieces to work equally well on a huge façade or inside an exhibition space.

Colour also plays a fundamental role. In contrast to the explosion of colour found in the work of some other urban artists, Aryz often uses pastel tones, greens, pinks, blues and desaturated colours. The result is an instantly recognisable aesthetic that seeks to integrate with its surroundings rather than compete with them.

His evolution demonstrates precisely how urban art can move from the street into the studio without losing its identity.

Aryz and Barcelona: a relationship that began on the streets

Barcelona has been fundamental to the career of Octavi Serra Arrizabalaga. It was in the city's urban environment that he began experimenting with graffiti and developed a large part of his artistic language.

Since then, Aryz’s murals have travelled around the world. He has created interventions in countries including France, Japan, Denmark, China, Madagascar, Poland, the United States and Canada, establishing an international career.

One of his best-known interventions in Barcelona was Criança, created in 2023 inside the Basilica of Santa Maria del Pi. The work, which combined mural painting with studio work, depicted a mother and her child and established a dialogue between contemporary urban art and the religious space.

The piece was temporary, so it can no longer be visited there. However, there are still other places where you can discover some of his work.

Where can you see Aryz’s works?

One of the best options for discovering his work in Barcelona is BAS Museum, Barcelona Art Street Museum. The museum brings together a selection of national and international urban artists and features Aryz as part of its collection. His work is also included in one of the museum's conceptual routes, dedicated to irony, criticism and subversion.

Aryz at BAS Museum

Visiting BAS is a particularly interesting opportunity to see a work by Aryz outside the context of an urban wall and appreciate his brushstrokes, layers and details up close.

The piece, titled El Coleccionista, is part of a collection that also features works by international artists such as Felipe Pantone, Okuda San Miguel, Vhils, Escif, Bordalo II, Sixe Paredes, Dulk, Mina Hamada and many more.

Seeing Aryz in a museum environment offers a different perspective on his work. Rather than experiencing one of his monumental interventions on a city wall, visitors can get a closer look at the details, textures and techniques that make his paintings so distinctive.

La Pugna in Besòs

Another one of the works by Aryz that you can discover near Barcelona is La Pugna, a large-scale intervention created in 2019 in France and later linked to the BesArt project in Parc Fluvial del Besòs.

The piece is an excellent example of the artist's monumental period and his ability to work with human figures on a huge scale. It also reflects the visual language that has made Aryz’s murals so recognisable around the world.

La Cultura in Cardedeu

You can also find an Aryz mural in Cardedeu. La Cultura, created in 2017, depicts a man with his head bandaged in a contemplative pose and occupies a large gable wall in the town.

It is a good example of the artist's muralist period and his characteristic use of muted colours. The work also demonstrates his ability to transform large architectural surfaces into striking figurative compositions.

Discover Aryz in Barcelona

The career of Aryz demonstrates how graffiti and street art have evolved into artistic languages that are now fully integrated into contemporary art. From his first walls in Barcelona to his international exhibitions, the artist has built a distinctive visual universe that continues to explore the boundaries between painting and urban space.

And if you want to discover his work without having to explore the entire city searching for murals, BAS Museum is one of the places where you can do so. Here, you can see a work by Aryz alongside pieces by some of the major names in international urban art.

BAS Museum is located at Carrer de la Carabassa, 10, in Barcelona's Ciutat Vella, and its collection is dedicated to urban and contemporary art.