A University of Essex student has caused a freshers week stir by painting walls around the Colchester Campus.

Artist Henrik Schrat, a current PhD student within the Essex Business School, is painting murals around campus all week. These silhouettes form part of his exhibition Death by Text, the first art show of the new academic year in the University Gallery.

For the rest of the month, Schrat’s site-specific artwork will transform the University Gallery into a "wunderkammer" - a magic cabinet, where letters and text meet and create new meanings before travelling out of the Gallery into the public spaces and architecture on campus.

Schrat draws upon a visual language inspired by silhouettes, comics and science fiction. He invents scenarios full of irony and layered meaning while creating a narrative journey that travels around campus, searching to answer the question, ‘Why is text always black?’ He previously studied fine art at the Slade in London and has exhibited extensively internationally.

Notes to editors:
Henrik Schrat will complete his murals on walls around the Colchester Campus by Thursday 2 October and will then be in residence in the University Gallery for a week. 

Photographers and press are invited to the Colchester Campus to see his work. Please contact the Communications Office on telephone: 01206 872807 or e-mail: comms@essex.ac.uk if you wish to visit when Schrat is painting a mural.

Death By Text will run in the University Gallery for the rest of the month. Admission to the Gallery is free and it opens 12noon to 5pm Monday to Friday and 12noon to 4pm Saturday.