UNA Pizza 17th Avenue: A Painted Artboard for a Restaurant Dining Room

UNA Pizza + Wine runs a rotating artboard programme across its restaurants. Each location has a fixed panel above the banquette, and every six months or so a new artist is commissioned to fill it. The artwork is rented rather than bought: the restaurant pays a rental fee for the display period, and the artist keeps the work when it comes down. For the 17th Avenue restaurant, Kiran Rai-Bhullar of KINN Studios was commissioned to paint the east wall, a run of about 25 feet by 3 feet with a small cut-out for a service pipe.

The brief that comes with the programme is practical. The panels have to be covered exactly, edge to edge. The work has to be made for the space rather than pulled from a studio. It has to be hung in a morning, before service, and come down just as cleanly. Everything about the piece, from the panel construction to the mounting, was designed around those constraints.

What is in the painting

The composition reads from left to right along the length of the wall, the way a diner's eye moves across it from the tables. At the left, a woman's face in profile, painted large and close, with a nath and red lips. Beside her, a hand heavy with gold bangles reaches down and releases something into water. A small figure in a red dress stands in the ripples below. White birds cross the centre of the panel. At the right, a figure in red sits in a boat under a low sun, with a mango branch in fruit reaching into the frame. The palette runs warm orange and red against golden green water.

Because the wall sits directly above the banquette, the painting was composed for two distances at once. From across the room it works as one continuous landscape. From the seats below it breaks into its parts: a face, a hand, a boat, a branch. Both readings were planned at the drawing stage.

Made to be hung, and to come down

The piece was painted across several panels in the studio and hung as one continuous image. Each panel was built with cradle bars on the back and mounted on a french cleat, so the whole run could be lifted onto the wall in one morning without fixings showing on the face of the work. The service pipe on the east wall was measured on a site visit and cut into the panel before painting, so the artwork fits around it rather than stopping short.

Installation happened on a June morning before the restaurant opened. Because the panels are cleated rather than screwed, they can come off just as easily at the end of the display period, and the artwork stays intact for its next home.

Photographed in the room

The finished piece was photographed in August 2026 by Elisha Lozares of Masigla Studio, with the restaurant set for service. The photographs are shown here as delivered. Elisha retains copyright and the images are used under licence, which is why every image on this page carries her credit.

A second UNA, five years on

This is the second time KINN has painted for UNA. In 2021, Uprooted was painted directly onto the wall inside UNA Bridgeland, a permanent interior mural on displacement and roots. The 17th Avenue artboard is a different kind of commission: a temporary, rented piece made to travel. Together they show two ways a restaurant can bring painting into the dining room, one fixed and one that changes with the seasons.

If you run a restaurant, bar or cafe in Calgary and are thinking about a feature wall, our art installation and mural work covers both approaches, painted in place or built as panels to hang.