Rizzy Akanji × Bupa: Painting Europe's Largest Hand-Painted Mural on London's South Bank

Akanji Studio artist Rizzy Akanji partnered with Bupa to bring her artwork Golden Inner Child to Europe's largest hand-painted mural — a 773m² public installation on London's South Bank, in the heart of Southwark.

Art has always been Rizzy Akanji's language for health, healing, and lived experience. In 2026, that language reached its biggest audience yet — painted across a wall the size of nearly three football pitches, in one of London's most-visited public spaces.

The Partnership: Akanji Studio × Bupa

Rizzy Akanji partnered with Bupa on "Express Your Health," a campaign built around a simple idea: health conversations resonate more when they're human, visual, and shared in public — not just delivered through a screen.

At the centre of the campaign was Golden Inner Child, an original artwork by Rizzy Akanji depicting a childhood version of herself resting on a gold crescent moon, suspended from a blood bag. It's a piece rooted in Rizzy's own lived experience, vulnerability and hope held in the same frame, rendered in the gold symbolism that runs through all of her work.

That artwork became the centrepiece of Europe's largest hand-painted mural.

Where It Stood: South Bank, Southwark

The mural was sited on London's South Bank, near the National Theatre, in the London Borough of Southwark, one of the capital's busiest and most culturally significant public spaces.

That location was deliberate. South Bank isn't a gallery you have to choose to visit, it's a route people already walk every day. Commuters, tourists, families, and the wider arts community encountered Golden Inner Child simply by passing through Southwark, not because they'd sought out a health campaign or an exhibition.

For the length of the campaign, the mural stood as a landmark on South Bank, putting themes of healing, vulnerability, and health directly into the daily life of the borough, before it came down on 5 July 2026.

Being the largest hand-painted mural in Europe wasn't just a headline, it was the mechanism. At 773m², Golden Inner Child was impossible to walk past without noticing. That scale turned a personal artwork into a shared public moment, reaching people who would never have opted into a traditional health campaign.

It's also a milestone for Rizzy Akanji as an artist: a body of personal, symbolic work, the gold, the surrealism, the lived-experience storytelling that defines Akanji Studio's practice, realised at a scale rarely offered to any artist, let alone one working from real, personal history.