Street Art Cities has revealed its official Artists’ Choice Award for the Best Street Art of 2025, greeting winner Tirso Paz, known as Bublegum, at his wall at the fifth edition of the Calais Street Art Festival in northern France, according to an announcement made on Instagram.
The self-styled international “global community for street artists and street art addicts” recognised Paz, who was born in Lugo, Spain and started painting at the age of 16, for a mural he created for the Graffitea Cheste urban art festival in Cheste, Valencia, Spain, in April 2024. His portfolio now includes murals all over the world.
The winning “Ornamental Ocelot” in Cheste depicts a wildcat as “a guardian, strategically placed in an alley to impose its presence and protect the space,” Paz has explained. Often influenced by modernist sculptures, gargoyles, tattoos, and female portraiture, here Paz deploys his newly developed “ornamental” style, fusing animals and intricate filigree, with his characteristic dynamic use of light. He uses a palette of warm tones to create “a vibrant yet harmonious touch.”
Street Art Cities said in their Instagram post that the mural “earned him the respect of fellow artists” as well as a mailbox “filled with new opportunities as a lot of people want to work with him.”
The curious can explore Bublegum’s works – which include a series of neighbourhood “angel” figures, one of which was dedicated to a local woman suffering from cancer – on the Street Art Cities mobile platform and app. Other artists can be discovered there, too.
The brainchild of two street art enthusiasts, Belgian Tim Marschang, from Antwerp, and Dutch graphic designer Sanne Gijsbers, from Heerlen, the app’s interactive global map features nearly 80,000 artworks at the time of writing. It’s possible for online visitors to search through them all by location, by artist, by tag, and even by hunter.
The concept functions like a mass, collaborative treasure hunt. Public visitors to the online site can upload photographs of street art that they come across in real life, as well as vote for their favourite pieces, month by month.
Hunters are described as “the core of the community” but, with an events calendar listing street art happenings all over the world, the site also works to help municipalities “put their city on the map and promote their street art scene”, as well as providing tools to let street artists “connect with their fans.” Majority European at present, the initiative has 16 partner cities, half of which are in Belgium, with others in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom – as well as Phoenix in the United States.
