Amazing Original Berlin Wall Murals Restored After 20 Years [Fine Art]

Amazing Original Berlin Wall Murals Restored After 20 Years

Thu, Nov 12, 2009

The city of Berlin decided to restore all the original paintings by the original artists from the Berlin Wall to celebrate 20 years since the historic fall of separated Germany. Now stands an amazing newly restored wall of abstract art of the East Side Gallery GDR.

The East Side Gallery is a 3/4 mile (1.3 km) section of the Berlin Wall painted with over 100 murals on the east side, where prettifying had been strictly verboten before 1989. In 1990 after the rest of the wall came down, artists from all over the world came to Berlin to paint the east side canvas.

It was meant to be a beautiful symbol of human rights and world freedom, but over the years the concrete rotted, the walls cracked and crumbled, the murals were peeling. Long tracts of the wall had to be rebuilt from the rebar up, so some paintings had to be completely redone, this time in water-resistant acrylic.

[Last] Friday, in concert with the city-wide Fall of the Wall celebrations, 90 artists from the original 118 returned to repaint, restore and conserve 106 of the murals.

The artists “have conveyed a second time their genuine euphoria from 1990,” said Kani Alavi, who heads the East Side Gallery Artists’ Association and was a driving force behind the restoration.

“Twenty years after the fall of the wall, the East Side Gallery stands for democracy and human rights,” he said.

“Every (artist) had his own perceptions on the fall of the wall,” Wowereit said. “I think this international nature, these different points of view and this variety are a secret of the success of this great open-air exhibition.”