This mural got painted on the facade of an old building just outside of Leipzig, in the village Hohenheida. As the building belongs to a complex of three big farmhouses, the derivation towards a chicken arose instantly in my imagination. My friend ´Busr´ (who helped me with the execution) and I were brainstorming through various possibilities of chicken arrangements. Our first idea was to paint 7 chicken, squeezed together tightly over the facade, to rise awareness towards the suffering of caged chickens. As we developed the idea further we realized that the wall would be simply too full. As we’re both architects we decided to develop the idea further towards Mies van der Rohes’ famous quote ‘Less is More’.
So we broke the design down to 5, later 3 and in the end only one chicken that we decided to be so much on point, that it doesn’t need anything else. Another inspiration came from the famous rubber chicken toy. I took the overall shape of the chicken and applied it in a way that we could fit most of the painting in between the windows, as this was a major issue with this wall. The whole facade contains 14 windows, which is an issue usually quite hard to work with. So we placed the legs, neck and head in between the eight windows on the side. On the middle part we covered the remaining windows with canvases that we just simply painted over with our design. It was no problem for the inhabitants as in the middle part of the building there were only unused, or storage rooms. So we didn’t disturb anyone by taking their natural light away. This chicken is obviously naked as we used only leftover facade paints that were provided by the owners of the house, mainly grey and beige tones.
In the end it turned out to be a real cool project and the neighbors told us that there’s still many people stopping by with their cars to take pictures of it.