OSGEMEOS Bring Their Dreamworld to Lisbon with a New Mural

Brazilian twin artists OSGEMEOS, Gustavo and Otávio Pandolfo, have completed a monumental new mural in Lisbon, bringing music, pattern and surreal storytelling of their extraordinary visual universe to a towering façade in the neighbourhood of Graça.

Created with Underdogs, the work occupies the wall at Rua da Senhora da Glória 39, a site with its own place in Lisbon’s recent street art history. For almost a decade it carried the 2017 collaboration between Vhils and Shepard Fairey, in which the two artists divided a female portrait between Fairey’s graphic image-making and Vhils’ excavated surface.

OSGEMEOS have filled the vertical wall with an exuberant, almost cinematic scene: two elongated yellow characters stacked one above the other, dressed in patterned clothing and surrounded by the objects, visual jokes and miniature narratives that reward looking twice.

Look Closer at OSGEMEOS’ work.

A spray can becomes a character in its own right. A patterned shoulder bag sprouts a face. A hand hovers over a blue vinyl record, while shoes, buttons, jewellery, fabrics and fragments of graffiti are rendered with the obsessive detail that runs through OSGEMEOS’ work.

Among those details is the name “Margarida”, a recurring and deeply personal reference to the twins’ mother, Margarida Leda Kanciukaitis Pandolfo. Her name has appeared in earlier works by OSGEMEOS, connecting their murals to family, memory and home.

Ontop of the head of the lower figure, another world opens up entirely: two small figures sit within a miniature landscape of water, trees, rocks, architecture and a striped lighthouse. The scene feels like a portal into Tritrez, the parallel universe that has long shaped the brothers’ visual language, where memory, dreams and imagination collapse into one another.

The lighthouse feels especially resonant in 2026, when OSGEMEOS have also explored the motif in The Lighthouse of the Floating Island.

That movement between the monumental and the microscopic is central to OSGEMEOS’ work. Their murals can be read instantly from across a city block, yet the closer you move, the more they begin to unfold: hidden references, private histories and entire worlds embedded within the larger composition. The brothers have spent decades constructing this universe, and in Lisbon, they invite us inside it once again.

From São Paulo to Tritrez

Gustavo and Otávio Pandolfo grew up in São Paulo and began painting graffiti in 1987, immersed in the city’s emerging hip-hop culture. Breakdancing, DJ culture, graffiti and music became inseparable from their developing artistic language. But behind the instantly recognisable yellow figures lies something more personal.

The brothers call their imagined universe Tritrez, a world they conceived during childhood and have continued developing throughout their careers. The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, which staged their major survey OSGEMEOS: Endless Story, describes Tritrez as a mystical universe populated by their large-headed figures and shaped by childhood memories, dreams, Brazilian culture, hip-hop, nature and the supernatural.

OSGEMEOS themselves have described it beautifully: “Tritrez for us is our soul. It’s our parallel world that we believe that lives inside of us.”

The Lisbon wall feels like a portal into precisely that place. The transparent head is particularly revealing: reality literally contains another reality. A city exists within a character who exists within Lisbon. It is an image within an image, a recurring OSGEMEOS idea in which bodies, landscapes, architecture and imagination refuse to remain separate.

Music Never Leaves the Picture

There is another unmistakable thread running through the mural: music. One figure has a hand on a vinyl record, rendered large enough to become a visual anchor within the composition. It is not decorative nostalgia. Hip-hop culture sits at the foundation of OSGEMEOS’ practice; the brothers came of age breakdancing, painting graffiti and DJing in 1980s São Paulo, and music continues to appear throughout their paintings, sculptures and installations. The Hirshhorn’s survey likewise placed hip-hop, breakdancing and music among the central influences on their work.

GraffitiStreet has followed that connection before. In 2017 we documented OSGEMEOS’ double mural in New York, where the twins paid tribute to the city’s 1980s hip-hop and breaking culture through references to b-boys, Rock Steady Crew and the history of graffiti itself. Almost a decade later, the record is still spinning.

Related Reading

Explore more OSGEMEOS on GraffitiStreet, including their 2017 New York double mural celebrating hip-hop culture, their collaboration with Aryz for Urban Forms in Łódź, Poland, and their appearance at the Branded Arts Festival in Queens, New York, 2022.

Photography copyright Mike Doorline. Mike Doorline is a Lisbon-based videographer and multimedia content creator known for documenting street art, murals and contemporary urban art projects. He has photographed or filmed projects by artists including OSGEMEOS, Vhils, Add Fuel and Trash King Bordalo II.