ernest zacharevic

Lithuania

Ernest Zacharevic, better known as ZACH, is a Lithuanian artist whose iconic, lighthearted pieces have become enormously popular across the world. By fusing the physical world with his imagination, this artist makes street art that is realistic but creative.

Zacharevic was born in Vilnus in 1986, Lithuania where he started out young, scribbling with crayons on his dad’s newspaper. At some point, his parents decided to take him to an art school, so his professional art education started when he was eleven. After he graduated, he went to Art Academy to study Graphic arts. ZACHAS found that experience not very inspiring and as too much of a replication of his art during school time. That is why he decided to move to London:

“It was a very conservative boarding art school with Greek heads and not much creativity. Afterwards I went to study in London were I graduated with Fine Art BA. It was the opposite – a lot of conceptualism, not much structure.”

But, throughout all that time, graffiti was always there, like a parallel world which, according to Ernest, was the constitution of freedom. After an education of classical arts, Ernest began to develop his works in direct contact with the public space where he intervenes the architectural landscape in a fusion between paintings and recycled objects. On his travels through places like Rome, Brussels, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore (among many) he has not seized to create admiration from the public through his outstanding murals.

He first attracted the attention of the international art scene with the creation of large mural interventions scattered across the old town of Penang. His illustrative style and the use of stencils earned him a nickname The Malay Banksy, as he is referred to by some.

view projects