by Jorit, in
Odintsovo In August 2019, Jorit painted the face of the first man in space,
Yuri Gagarin, on the facade of a twenty-story building in the district of
Odintsovo, Russia. At the base of the mural is "СССР", the abbreviation for the
official name of the Soviet Union in the
Russian alphabet. It is the largest portrait of Gagarin in the world. On 22 February 2021, he painted the face of on the facade of a building in
Tufello,
Rome. Verbano was an Italian
communist militant, killed in 1980 in an ambush by three
fascists who had entered his home. In Florence, Jorit published a mural depicting the young
Antonio Gramsci in 2020. In the wall is Gramsci's words: "Even when all is or seems lost, one must quietly set to work again, starting from the beginning ... The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old dies and the new cannot be born".
Painting in the West Bank and expulsion from Israel Jorit and another artist, Salvatore Tukios, were detained for three days after painting a mural depicting a Palestinian adolescent activist,
Ahed Tamimi, who had become an iconic figure among Palestinians after slapping the face of an Israeli soldier outside her home in the
West Bank village of
Nabi Salih. The mural – whose completion was scheduled to coincide with Tamimi's release from an 8-month prison sentence – was set on the
Bethlehem side of
Israel's Separation Barrier. Upon their return to Naples on 30 July, their families, waiting at the airport, asked that no photos be taken, as they wished to remain anonymous.
Russo-Ukrainian war After
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Jorit stated that Italy should have been supporting the
Russian-backed separatists of the Donbas region in Ukraine since 2014. Jorit made a mural in Naples of
Fyodor Dostoevsky, in whose eye is a child in the colours of the Russia-controlled
Donetsk People's Republic. He argued that the issue had to be seen from 2014, and that the peoples of the Donbas had self-determined through
two referendums, and that children of the two republics had been killed by the Ukrainian army for eight years. His street art was mentioned by Russian president
Vladimir Putin during the invasion of Ukraine to illustrate his view that it would be impossible to obliviate Russian culture. Jorit described a mural of a young girl that he made in July 2023 on a bombed-out building in occupied
Mariupol (after a siege that the Red Cross called "apocalyptic"), as seeking to present a narrative of the bombing of the city and its inhabitants by "NATO missiles". Jorit later said he had come across the photo by searching on Google for "pigtails", and he had redrawn the shirt and the pigtails. Critics also questioned the appropriateness of Jorit's mural after Russian forces had previously removed a mural by
Sasha Korban in Mariupol that depicted a Ukrainian girl who lost her leg and her mother in an
artillery rocket attack by pro-Russian separatist forces in 2015. ==Acknowledgments==