Artist Completes World’s Tallest Mural In El Salvador

20-year-old Venezuelan artist Oscar Olivares has unveiled the world’s largest plastic bottle cap mural.

The mural located at Building 88 in the Zacamil neighbourhood of San Salvador is 13 meters high and made of 100,000 pieces of recycled plastic bottle caps.

The figure in the mural, Olivares said, is a representation of Raphael’s Mona Lisa, but adapted to the Salvadorian context. She is a dark-skinned woman with curly hair, dressed in the colours of the El Salvador flag. The woman, he continued, does not represent anyone in particular, but rather an ordinary citizen, noting that the renaissance of El Salvador and Latin America is in ordinary people.

The bottle lids used in the work were collected by residents of Zacamil and recyclers linked to the National Association of Collectors and Recyclers (ASONARES). The project was also supported by the Custom-Made Stories Foundation and the company Full Painting.

The mural is not Olivares’ first intervention of this kind, but it is the place where he left the largest. The mural has been developing large-format works with reused plastics in different countries for years. His first emblematic project in this format was the Oko-Mural, carried out in 2020 in El Hatillo, Caracas, which laid the foundations for a proposal that has since travelled to at least six countries, including Mexico, Italy, Panama, France, and Saudi Arabia.

His work is present in nearly 22 countries and has been exhibited at fairs and events such as Art Expo New York.q