Ola Volo’s murals speak for themselves. Sprawled across buildings and walls, they remind us of old art deco posters, but with an added multiculturalist edge. Volo, a Kazakhstan-born, Vancouver-raised painter draws inspiration from her tradition and background, blending together history with fantasy.
“Growing up in Kazakhstan at my grandparents’ farm, my grandparents would put on records and we would just listen to folktale stories,” she shared with CBC. “I spent a lot of time kind of getting swept away into a different world.”
Rich with symbolism, her murals feature animals, people, architecture, and nature, transforming public realms and outdoor spaces into fantastical settings. “The bigger the wall, the more of a voice it has,” said Volo. “It is an imagined world that I create of Russian and Kazakh and Polish stories, and the minute I started doing the artwork on walls it became larger than me.”
With more than 25 thousand followers on Instagram, and clients like Starbucks, Louis Vuitton, and Volkswagen, Volo’s art is taking over the world one wall at a time.
