Artist Roa's Street Art in Antwerp, Belgium*

Belgian Street Art Mural in Ghent featuring work from street artist ROA

Hookedblog was recently in Antwerp, Belgium having been invited to check out some of the Belgian Street Art in Flanders as part of a visit organized by Visit Flanders.

We spent a few days in Belgium seeking out the street art in Antwerp as well as Ghent, two cities we have not visited before. We will be sharing our extended street art city guides from both locations on the blog soon.

Belgian Street Artist Roa
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One artist whose work we were certain we would see on our visit was of Belgian street and graffiti artist ROA (Previously on Hookedblog).

Hailing from Ghent, ROA is internationally known for his large-scale black and white murals. With an interest in anatomy and the animal kingdom, ROA’s murals often feature wild/urban animals and birds that are usually native to the country in which the mural is being painted in.

While exploring the streets of Ghent and Antwerp we did indeed discover some of ROA’s murals including some of those pictured here but not as many as we had hoped.

And while we didn’t track down as many works as we would have liked to have seen, in Antwerp we did actually manage to catch up with the elusive artist himself.

Street Art Mural in Ghent, Belgium featuring work from street artist ROA

We found these sleeping rabbits painted by artist ROA in Ghent, Belgium.

One of ROA's street art birds was joined by another Belgian artist Bue along the canal in Ghent, Belgium.

Details of two ROA birds from a work from his Cataclysm exhibition

Roa's 'Cataclysm' Exhibition
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ROA, unlike most street artists, is not on social media and it was only after our arrival in Antwerp that we learned of the news of an exhibition from the artist.

A few weeks before the official opening of the exhibition, we dropped ROA a message on the off chance he might already be in town ahead of the show. Within an hour we were excited to get a message back inviting us over to the gallery for a sneak peek of the show.

Later that afternoon we found ourselves catching up with ROA at the gallery space. We learned that the exhibition titled 'Cataclysm' is ROA’s first show in Belgium in four years and what a beautiful space for the show.

At The Gallery hosting the exhibition is an impressive large gallery space, bathed in lots of natural light and is where ROA produced this all-new body of work during a six-week artist-in-residence period in the gallery space.

With a number of the large-scale works still in progress ROA asked us not to share too many photos online ahead of the show's official opening, so below is a small selection of images we took during our visit.

ROA's Cataclysm exhibition will run At The Gallery until the 7th of January 2018 so plenty of time for you ROA fans out there to get yourselves over to Antwerp for a visit. Here at Hookedblog, we are already planning our return visit to Antwerp for a second visit to the exhibition now that all the works have been finished.