Brussels art city: street art, murals & museums

Par Gabriel Goldberg 4 June 2026 6 min read

Brussels never signed a pact with art: it is art, permanently, without permission. A city where painting escapes the frame, where walls talk, where an erotic mural can appear between two stately buildings on Avenue Louise without anyone really losing sleep over it. That's exactly what's held me here for so many years: the tension between institution and wild gesture, between Gothic cathedral and nocturnal stencil, between museum and the electrical cabinet repainted as a fox. I've spent the past months photographing what I cross. Not to document — to remember. Here are ten images, ten doorways into a city that refuses to choose between academic beauty and joyful disorder. A city where art doesn't ask permission Let's say it upfront: in Brussels, "raw" art — urban, popular, unauthorised — isn't a counter-culture. It is the culture. The city has understood this, sometimes reluctantly, and always ends up integrating it. The best example remains Bonom , a street artist turned myth thanks to his monumental animal murals — and his more disturbing interventions. Remember the erotic mural that appeared on Avenue Louise , that giant "masturbatrice" that made headlines for weeks . It was erased, of course. But the gesture remains. And the City of Brussels now honours Bonom on its own institutional website . That's Brussels: it growls, then it embraces. In front of a monumental Alechinsky — the eye captured by the acid green and burnt orange of the CoBrA movement. Museums, or memory that…