Discover Nuart Aberdeens must-see murals

How to get to your start point –

Driving - Park your car at Harriet Street car park at the Bon Accord center and walk 2 minutes towards St Andrews Street

Bus – the nearest stop is Blackfriars Street (Stop P1) on St Andrew Street, served by several routes including the 12, 59, and 10/10A. From there, the Sandman Hotel and your starting point are right on your doorstep.

Train - If you're arriving by train, Aberdeen Railway Station is just an 5-minute walk from Rennies Wynd - the final stop on the trail. So if you fancy doing the trail in reverse, simply head out of the station, make your way to Rennies Wynd to start, and you'll finish up at the Sandman Hotel end of the city centre.

Stand in front of the entrance to the Sandman hotel and look directly across the street - your first stop is impossible to miss. High on the wall above Blackfriars Street, Spanish artist Manolo Mesa has painted a giant still life: two ceramic vases, one blue, one green, simple yet utterly commanding.

Mesa's idea is to bring the inside outside - to take something so ordinary and give it a new life in the open air. But these aren't just decorative shapes. The vases carry imagined histories, passed through generations, witness to countless lives and stories. That sense of quiet mystery is exactly what makes you stop, look up, and wonder.

A perfect start to the trail - and a reminder that sometimes the simplest things say the most.

Duck into Jopps Lane for one of the trail's most thought-provoking stops. Scottish artist Robert Montgomery - described by some as the "poet's Banksy" - has been bringing poetic text to walls, billboards and light installations across the world.

For Aberdeen he took aim at power and the way grand rhetoric can crush the dreams of ordinary people, using a section of a long poem as his medium. Five days in the making, it's a piece that rewards reading slowly.

Still in Jopps Lane area within the Tiso carpark, Australian artist Fintan Magee painted not one but two murals on his first visit to Aberdeen.

Born of Scottish descent, Fintan is one of the world's leading figurative street artists, known for work that finds the extraordinary in everyday life.

His Aberdeen piece depicts three figures standing on a broken wall - a direct response to the rhetoric around division and border-building. A quiet but powerful call to look beyond bias and find connection with those around us. Painted over ten days with help from local artist Mary Butterworth.

Back towards the Sandman Hotel and just around the corner on Crooked Lane, just past the Hotel carpark, you'll find one of the trail's most striking pieces. Hama Woods painted Aberdeen's own symbol - the leopard - high on the wall, surrounded by geometric shapes in bold, beautiful colours in her signature multi-layered stencil style.

Created in four sections over three marathon days, each section built up through careful stencil work before being finished freehand. Hama's work is driven by a deep reverence for nature and a sharp eye on human greed and consumption. Playful, bold, and impossible to ignore.

Directly ahead, on Crooked Lane you will find a new mural for 2026 by Molly Hankinson from Glasgow.

Molly makes work that asks how art can evoke feeling, offer comfort and create genuine connection in shared spaces. Her Aberdeen mural, Dream of a Common Language, brings that intent to the city street - a piece of quiet tenderness and stillness that feels both personal and universal.

Look to your right to find this powerful piece by Polish artist M-City (Mariusz Waras), one of street art's most prolific and distinctive voices - with over 700 works to his name.

For his Aberdeen debut he turned his gaze on the city's shifting oil economy, creating a bold, stencilled response to a city in transition. Completed in just four days working alongside local graffiti artists Alter Ego, it's a piece that sparked conversations the moment it went up - and continues to do so.

To your left, On the back wall of the Bon Accord Centre facing onto George Street, you'll find the work of London-based abstract artist Remi Rough.

A pivotal figure whose practice has traced a path from letterforms through to pure abstraction, Remi describes his compositions as "visual haikus" - works built on rhythm, balance and a poetic sense of space. His piece here sits at the heart of the 2026 festival theme, a reminder that street art has always been rooted in language, even when the letters disappear entirely.

Make your way to Loch Street for CBloxx (Jay Gilleard), an English artist whose work is rooted in portraiture - faces of triumph, resilience, and quiet defiance rendered in aerosol with extraordinary detail. Co-founder of the celebrated duo Nomad Clan, who painted the tallest mural in the UK, CBloxx returned to solo practice in 2020 and brought that hard-won skill to Aberdeen.

Themes of community, identity, mental health, and social justice run through everything they make.

This piece for Nuart 2026 transformed the exterior of a building on Little Belmont Street into a poetry house - its walls covered in poems, phrases and stanzas for anyone passing by to read.

Alongside it, smaller works appeared in quieter corners across the city, in spots that might otherwise go unnoticed. Taken together, they made good on the 2026 festival's theme in the most literal way possible: poetry, genuinely, in the streets.

Head back onto Belmont street, then take a right onto Union Street, following the main path for around 5 minutes until you reach Huntly street.

Hicks has spent more than twenty years exploring the space between apocalypse and transcendence - drawing on divination, Jungian psychology, folk saints and the tradition of British Romanticism. His Summer Street mural brings those preoccupations to life at scale: an expansive landscape scene in the Romantic tradition, set high above the street, with fragmented words and phrases layered across the image.

On Union Wynd you'll find a mural full of warmth and humanity by Helen Bur. This is her second piece for Nuart Aberdeen - her first was lost when the building it was painted on was demolished.

Here she reunites the same couple from that original work, Hugo and Ally, now shown as a family with their newborn Ruby-Rae. Painted during World Breastfeeding Week, the mural has become a backdrop for breastfeeding mothers and advocates across the city.

A story of love, continuity, and new beginnings.

At Union Plaza, look up and you'll see a child - five storeys tall - reaching up to explore the building above them.

Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic is classically trained but prefers the street, and his Aberdeen piece captures that spirit perfectly: a giant small child interacting playfully with the cold geometry of modern architecture, making it feel suddenly human.

We must admit, the seagulls are pretty close to life size!

On Union Row, Norwegian duo Nimi and RH74 have brought one of Scotland's most haunting legends to life - the Green Lady of Crathes Castle. Draped in Aberdeen tartan and cradling a child, her face turned toward the viewer with a single tear, she is beautiful and heartbreaking in equal measure.

The artists researched the dark histories behind such figures - servant girls silenced and erased - and chose not to look away. Surrounded by flowers added by a host of local collaborators, this is a mural that honours what history often forgets.

Still on Union Row, Slim Safont's piece - titled The Punishment - takes the school-day ritual of writing lines on a blackboard and turns it into something far more unsettling.

A witty but sharp reflection on the mechanisms of control and indoctrination that shape us from childhood. Voted the best street art piece in the world for June 2022 by the Street Art Cities community, it clearly struck a chord well beyond Aberdeen.

Image credit: Aberdeen Live

On the side of Rustico's on Union Row, Portuguese artist Bordalo II has created a unicorn - Scotland's national animal - out of salvaged plastic waste: wheelie bins, pipes, car parts. Half painted, half raw material, the piece is titled Endangered Dreams.

The message is as blunt as it is beautiful: the very materials destroying our natural world have been used to construct an image of it. A vivid, unsettling, and strangely joyful piece.

Also on Union Row, Argentinian artist Milu Correch has painted two masked women, resting back to back, seemingly asleep - or perhaps somewhere between consciousness and dream.

Milu is known for work that cuts through moral and aesthetic certainties with sharp irony, and this quietly dark, ambiguous scene is no exception. Taken from literature, cinema, and the shadowy corners of the imagination.

At Holburn Junction, Sheffield-based artist Phlegm has painted one of his signature monochrome worlds - intricate, surreal, and entirely his own.

Inspired by Aberdeen's granite heritage, the mural depicts workers chiselling away at enormous stone pillars, part of an ever-expanding imaginary universe that Phlegm has been building across walls worldwide. Working only in black and white, he creates something closer to an illustrated myth than a mural.

Just off Union Street on Willowbank Road, Glasgow duo Conzo & Glöbel have paid tribute to Aberdeen's most infamous urban menace - the seagull.

Rendered as a retro action figure toy ("The New Super Scurry"), the piece is full of colour, calligraphy, and tongue-in-cheek humour. It's gloriously Aberdeen-specific, and a welcome moment of levity on the trail.

head back towards Union street and head down to the Green, prepare to be stopped in your tracks by Smug (Sam Bates), a Glasgow-based Australian whose photo-realist spray-can work sits among the finest technical murals anywhere in the world.

Using nothing but aerosol, he creates images of such precision and depth that they could be mistaken for photographs.

A new addition to the Green are for 2026 is paste ups from Tarckie Macleod.

Your final stop, just off Rennies Wynd onto Denburn road, brings the trail to a close with French artist Mahn Kloix - a Marseille-based artist raised in a family of activists, whose work has taken him from the streets of Istanbul to the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

His portraits of protesters, whistleblowers, and everyday resisters are rendered with ink and urgency, turning Aberdeen's walls into a gallery of global solidarity. A quietly powerful way to end the walk.