Street Artist in the Spotlight: Nils Westergard

Belgian-American artist Nils Westergard works between Richmond, Virginia and Amsterdam, combining large-scale muralism with extraordinarily intricate hand-cut stencil work. His distinctive portraits often emerge through loose, dripping monochrome marks, while his studio practice reveals the precision of an artist who can spend many hours cutting a single stencil by hand.

Image Copyright Nils Westergard

Westergard’s visual language developed through graffiti, theatrical set painting and film, disciplines that continue to shape his understanding of scale, composition and narrative. Human relationships remain central to much of his work, with portraits exploring intimacy, vulnerability, power and the subtleties communicated through body language.

Nils Westergard’s New Mural: Inspired by Amsterdam’s Oudezijdskolk Canal

Portraiture, Stencils and the Unspoken

When GraffitiStreet first interviewed Nils Westergard, he described an important shift in his practice. Earlier work had been more overtly political, while his portraits increasingly became concerned with mood, personal relationships and what can be communicated without words.

Friends and people encountered through everyday life have frequently entered his work, transformed through scale into imposing public figures. Yet even at their largest, Westergard’s portraits retain a psychological quality. A gaze, a turned head or the position of a hand can carry as much meaning as the identity of the sitter.

Stencil cutting provides another side to the practice. The process can be painstakingly exact; for GraffitiStreet’s Underground 2016 exhibition in London, Westergard spent 104 hours hand-cutting an intricate map of the capital before spraying it onto wood and mounting the original stencil over the finished work.

Image Copyright Nils Westergard

The Amsterdam Cyclist

After moving to Amsterdam, Westergard began documenting the city’s cycling culture through The Amsterdam Cyclist, a series of small hand-cut stencil paintings capturing the individuality, style and everyday routines of people travelling through the city by bicycle.

GraffitiStreet explored the project further in our interview with Nils Westergard about The Amsterdam Cyclist.

Related Reading: Nils Westergard

GraffitiStreet’s relationship with Nils stretches back more than a decade. Our 2015 interview with Nils Westergard explores his early introduction to graffiti and stencils, his film background and the gradual shift from political imagery towards portraiture, mood and body language.

In Girl with Phone, Richmond, we documented his 2016 mural of a young woman absorbed in her mobile phone, transforming an everyday gesture into a monumental public portrait.

Westergard travelled to London for GraffitiStreet’s Underground 2016, where we followed him painting the streets of Shoreditch and documented the extraordinary 104-hour hand-cut London map stencil.

The same exhibition also brought Nils together with Belgian artist Bisser for a collaborative mural in Hoxton, combining Bisser’s distinctive characters with Westergard’s monochrome portraiture.

In The UNforgotten: Nils Westergard’s Memorial to Walter Degen, Westergard created a monumental portrait in Berlin honouring Walter Degen, who was imprisoned and persecuted by the Nazi regime for being homosexual.

In Checkmate, we explored the personal story behind his Virginia chess mural, inspired by Michael, a local friend with whom Nils shared a long-running ritual of playing chess.

Our Amsterdam Cyclist interview follows another side of his practice, capturing everyday Amsterdam life through a series of intimate, full-colour stencil portraits of the city’s cyclists.

In Nils Westergard’s New Mural: Inspired by Amsterdam’s Oudezijdskolk Canal, we follow Westergard’s evolving relationship with Amsterdam through a monumental portrait of an old skipper overlooking one of the city’s historic canals.

Most recently, The Majesty of Peregrine Falcons documents Westergard’s collaboration with photographer David Shaw for GraffitiStreet’s inaugural Chichester exhibition and his intricate stencil studies of the Cathedral’s peregrines.

More Artists in the Spotlight

For another approach to figurative muralism, explore Helen Bur, whose painterly figures similarly bring intimacy and human experience onto monumental walls. Discover SNIK for a very different exploration of the possibilities of intricate stencil art, or Bisser, the Belgian artist who collaborated with Westergard during GraffitiStreet’s Underground 2016 exhibition.

Discover Nils Westergard at GraffitiStreet

GraffitiStreet has worked with and documented Nils Westergard for more than a decade, from our early interviews and London exhibitions to his recent Peregrine works created for the opening of GraffitiStreet Gallery in Chichester.

Explore Nils Westergard at GraffitiStreet to discover available original works, including his hand-cut Peregrine stencils, or contact GraffitiStreet for current availability, acquisitions, mural enquiries and private viewings.

Visit GraffitiStreet Gallery, 25A West Street, Chichester, West Sussex, England PO19 1QW.