15 Street Art Portraits by Hopare

Hopare builds portraits from lines that seem to move with the city.

Across these 15 works, Hopare moves between monumental murals, paste-ups, and collages in places from Les Abymes and Lisbon to Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Each face holds together from a distance, then opens into line, color, wall texture, and motion up close.

Meet Hopare

Alexandre Monteiro, known as Hopare, is a French urban artist working between Paris and Lisbon. His practice also includes canvas, sculpture, ceramics, azulejos, embroidery, and objects shaped by travel and family memory.

💡 Nerd Fact: The word azulejo is not derived from Portuguese azul (“blue”). Imprensa Nacional traces it to the Arabic azzelij, meaning “small polished stone.”

He grew up in Limours and discovered graffiti as a teenager in an abandoned factory. He also met the artist Shaka, whose guidance helped turn an early fascination with lettering into something broader. Hopare’s early biography also traces how work with an interior designer sharpened the straight, parallel, interwoven lines that still move through his portraits.

Street Art for Mankind describes his visual language through lines, crossing colors, perspective, sketches, and geometric curves. Together, those elements keep a face open: solid from across the street, then fragmented into marks, gaps, wall texture, and motion as you move closer.

The wall is never only a background; it remains part of the portrait.

🔗 Follow Hopare on Instagram, visit his official website, and find him on Facebook

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🟥 “KIMIA” — Les Abymes, Guadeloupe 🇬🇵

Red fills the wall before the details come into focus. Kimia sits in white at the center, one hand resting on fruit while a Ka drummer, palm leaves, and market produce gather behind her. In Hopare’s account of the work, Kimia is a former soldier, and the mural also honors the women of Guadeloupe’s markets—women who carry families, stories, and culture across generations.

💡 Nerd Fact: Gwoka is a combined cultural practice, not simply a style of drumming. UNESCO defines it through responsorial singing in Guadeloupean Creole, rhythms played on Ka drums, and dance; it was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014.

The mural was painted in Le Raizet for the inaugural WAL FEST. The festival placed 12 monumental murals by 15 artists across the neighborhood, with residents watching the walls change in real time.

📷 Photo by Laure Tarer.

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⚽ Maradona Tribute — Naples, Italy 🇮🇹

In Naples, Maradona needs no introduction. Hopare places the black-and-white paste-up at walking height in the Quartieri Spagnoli, where the face seems to grow out of cracked plaster, old paint, and the daily traffic of the alley. Hopare describes Maradona as “a man of the people, for the people”; contemporary documentation from January 2025 records the collage in its Quartieri Spagnoli setting.

💡 Nerd Fact: The match that secured Napoli’s first Italian league title was not a victory. A 1–1 draw with Fiorentina on 10 May 1987 was enough to seal the championship; Roberto Baggio scored Fiorentina’s equalizer.

📷 Photo by Ride & Paint.

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🧵 “Trine” — Aalborg, Denmark 🇩🇰

For Trine, Hopare studied the Danish Golden Age and traditional dress before turning to a model painted by Ludvig August Smith: Catrine Nielsen, known as Trine. The historical reference provides the pose, but the wall belongs fully to Hopare’s own visual language. Long hair, a still gaze, and a patterned bodice keep their form while streams of color pass through them.

KIRK Gallery records that the mural was made at Danmarksgade 29 for the tenth anniversary of Aalborg’s Out in the Open project. Hopare completed his interpretation in five days.

💡 Nerd Fact: The source painting is catalogued as The model Catrine Nielsen, called Trine, is plaiting her hair, an 1839 oil on canvas measuring 74 × 60 centimetres. Smith graduated from the Danish art academy in 1841 and studied for a period under C. W. Eckersberg.

More: See “Trine” Across the Whole Wall (8 Photos)

📷 Photos in the series by Ride & Paint and Nico Giquel.

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📚 “Linda Brown” — Longlaville, France 🇫🇷

The blue facade is quiet; the portrait is not. White, orange, and dark blue marks move across the sitter’s face and clothing. Hopare titled the work Linda Brown and painted it for the first LongArtStreet festival in August 2021. Longlaville’s festival guide places the mural at 1 Rue René Picard.

Despite the title, LongArtStreet identifies the image as a portrait from one of Hopare’s journeys in Alabama, not as the civil-rights figure associated with Brown v. Board of Education. A separate mural record similarly describes the sitter as a young woman Hopare encountered in the state.

💡 Nerd Fact: Brown v. Board of Education was not a single lawsuit. The Supreme Court consolidated five school-segregation cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Delaware; Linda Brown was the Topeka child whose exclusion from a white elementary school prompted the Kansas case.

More: See Hopare’s Linda Brown Mural Up Close (8 Photos)

📷 Photo by Ride & Paint.

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🧣 “Un tissu à la conquête du monde” (“A Fabric to Conquer the World”) — Paris, France 🇫🇷

Seen from above, the patio at Forum des Halles becomes a face and the people crossing it become moving marks. Painted from 21 June to 1 July 2021, the temporary work covered 250 square metres. The scale is enormous, but the idea stays personal: memory carried on a woman’s face and through the patterned stole around her.

💡 Nerd Fact: Before the shopping and transit complex, Les Halles was Paris’s central food market. It began outside medieval Paris as a dry-goods market and the old wholesale complex closed in 1969.

In Hopare’s description of the work, the stole maps a route through local and global history and invites viewers on a journey around the world. The fixed portrait and moving crowd completed the work together; every person who crossed the floor entered it for a few seconds.

More: Walk Through Hopare’s 250 m² Paris Portrait (9 Photos)

📷 Photos in the series by Ride & Paint and Visual Xplorer.

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🪢 “Werushka” — Montévrain, France 🇫🇷

Black lines gather into a high braided bun, pass across the closed eyes, and loosen again around the neck. Orange enters only below the face, giving the still profile a pulse without breaking its calm. Werushka was created in May 2021 for the Clos du Chêne open-air street-art project in Montévrain. The work is part of the project route at Clos du Chêne on Avenue de la Ferme Briarde.

More: See “Werushka” in Six Full-Size Views

📷 Photo by Ride & Paint.

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👩‍👧 Mother and Child — Los Angeles, USA 🇺🇸

A mother holds a child across the side of a downtown building. Windows interrupt the bodies. Pink and purple bands cut through them. The architecture never disappears, which makes the pair feel fully embedded in the city’s balconies, rooms, traffic, and changing light.

Contemporary documentation from 2017 describes it as Hopare’s largest wall at the time and records the French inscription, which presents a mother as a child’s guide. The mural was made for Avenue des Arts near the corner of East 8th and South Los Angeles streets in downtown Los Angeles.

💡 Nerd Fact: The French inscription adapts an 1861 line by Louis Belmontet. Belmontet’s version uses le Seigneur (“the Lord”); the mural substitutes le ciel (“the sky”).

More: See Hopare’s Los Angeles Wall (3 Photos)

📷 Photo by Nico Giquel.

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🌺 Profile With Flowers — Tai O, Hong Kong 🇭🇰

Here the color drops away. A black-and-white paste-up of a woman turns in profile while white flowers rise from her shoulder and hair. In Hopare’s account of returning to Tai O, he says he first discovered the fishing village more than a decade earlier and came back ten years later. Much of the old dark wall remains visible, allowing stains, cracks, and uneven plaster to finish the composition.

💡 Nerd Fact: Tai O’s stilt houses are known as pang uk. They are built above tidal flats and are associated with the Tanka fishing community, whose local food traditions include dried seafood and shrimp paste.

📷 Photo by Ride & Paint.

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🏺 “Les Gardiennes de l’Argile” — Lisbon, Portugal 🇵🇹

The title means The Guardians of Clay. In Hopare’s account of the Alfama collage, the work had spent more than a year in his studio before reaching the wall. The series grew from his time in São Pedro do Corval, which he describes as Portugal’s largest potters’ village, and from the people who keep its clay traditions alive.

💡 Nerd Fact: Corval’s pottery concentration is partly geological. The surrounding Alentejo contains distinctive clay deposits worked since prehistoric times, and São Pedro do Corval still has more than 20 traditional pottery workshops.

The restrained drawing keeps Lisbon’s weathered surface visible. Faded paint, exposed patches, and the small tree beside the wall do not merely surround the portrait; they become part of it.

📷 Photo by Ride & Paint.

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🚕 Street Portrait — Hong Kong 🇭🇰

A black-and-white paste-up sits on a scarred green wall while a red taxi slips through the street beside it. Hopare says he installed the portrait in the middle of the night in the heart of Hong Kong, describing it as ephemeral by nature but made to stand against time. Rust, old lettering, traffic, and peeling paint become a second set of lines around the woman’s gaze.

💡 Nerd Fact: Hong Kong taxi colors indicate permitted operating areas. Red taxis are the urban fleet, green taxis serve designated parts of the New Territories, and blue taxis serve Lantau.

📷 Photo by Nico Giquel.

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🌹 Untitled Portrait — Casablanca, Morocco 🇲🇦

Roses crown the wall as green, yellow, red, blue, and black lines cross the eyes, mouth, shoulders, and chest. The woman seems assembled from several moments at once. Contemporary coverage from March 2014 documented it simply as a new Hopare work in Casablanca; no confirmed title was published. It is early Hopare in full color: controlled enough to hold a likeness, loose enough to keep it moving.

💡 Nerd Fact: Casablanca’s name appears in several languages with the same meaning. Portuguese Casa Branca, Arabic al-Dar al-Bayda, and Spanish Casablanca all mean “White House.”

More: See Hopare’s Casablanca Portrait (2 Photos)

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🏔️ Untitled Portrait — Les Deux Alpes, France 🇫🇷

The head tilts forward and the lines become sharper. Red and yellow planes gather around the eyes, black marks pull through the hair, and empty wall remains visible around the jaw. Contemporary documentation from March 2015 identifies the work as a collage installed at the foot of a ski lift after Hopare spent several days on the slopes at Les Deux Alpes. No confirmed title was published. The close crop and sharp planes make the portrait feel immediate and tightly focused.

💡 Nerd Fact: “Les Deux Alpes” does not refer to two mountain peaks. The resort developed from the two alpine pastures of Mont-de-Lans and Venosc.

More: See Hopare in Les Deux Alpes and Grenoble (8 Photos)

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📻 Rue Chapon Portrait — Paris, France 🇫🇷

At 60 Rue Chapon, a narrow corner becomes a full face. Hopare painted the portrait on 26 September 2014 in connection with an interview for Radio Marais’s Urban Safari; the wall was part of the wider street series La Rue a du Charme. Street-Heart catalogues the piece as “Radio Marais – #Jensuis,” but no separate artist-confirmed title was found.

More: See Hopare’s Rue Chapon Portrait (2 Photos)

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✊ Nelson Mandela — Paris, France 🇫🇷

Hopare’s own 2013 post identifies this as his Nelson Mandela portrait in Paris. Mandela’s face emerges from white paint, black shadows, and a dense weave of color. Hopare does not smooth the concrete or hide the older graffiti around it. The portrait keeps the rough wall visible, making a globally recognized figure feel immediate and handmade rather than sealed inside a formal monument.

💡 Nerd Fact: Mandela’s prison number 466/64 encoded both sequence and year. He was the 466th person admitted to Robben Island prison in 1964.

More: See Hopare’s Nelson Mandela Portrait in Paris

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💭 “Rêveuse” — Orsay, France 🇫🇷

Documented as Rêveuse—Dreamer—this early aerosol mural turns a building beside Orsay’s swimming pool into a resting figure. The local tourism office places it at 27–29 Avenue de Lattre de Tassigny. Her hair falls behind her, one hand reaches toward the ground, and reflections of green, yellow, and red seem to pool below the body. At roughly 30 square metres, it already shows a tension Hopare would keep exploring: a face that feels present, drifting, and partly unfinished.

More: See Hopare’s Early Orsay Walls

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Which one is your favorite?