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Artists return for Berlin Wall facelift
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-06 10:11

 

Artists return for Berlin Wall facelift

November 1989: Berliners celebrate on top of the wall as East Germans (backs to camera) flood through the dismantled Berlin Wall into West Berlin at Potsdamer Platz. Exultant teenagers (left) show off pieces of the wall, which almost immediately became collector's items.

2009: The stones of the Berlin Wall Trail (top photo) indicate where the Berlin Wall used to stand. [Agencies]

BERLIN: Stroke by stroke, Gerhard Kriedner applied pink acrylic paint with a small brush on a 14-yard stretch of the Berlin Wall, recreating the mural he first painted months after the Berlin Wall came down.

Kriedner and 90 artists from around the world have gathered again to repaint their original creations on the concrete slabs, bringing new life to images that have been eroded by the elements over the last two decades, on the long est remaining length of the wall that once split Germany's capital.

"This is a very emotional thing for me," Kriedner, 69, said, adding that he left East Germany for the West himself as a young man.

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While Berliners were initially eager to tear down the city's most detested symbol, in recent months there has been a major effort to restore the 1.3-kilometer dilapidated East Side Gallery - a major tourist attraction with 106 different paintings and graffiti.

Pollution, weather and time have turned famous images like the fraternal kiss between East German leader Erich Honecker and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, or the East German Trabant car that appears to be bursting through the wall, into a sad sight - with long cracks in the concrete and big chunks of paint flaking off.

"We had nothing, only cheap paint and brushes, but we were so euphoric about all the historic changes and we wanted to express them in our paintings," said artist Kani Alavi, who has been the driving force behind the restoration work that started in October 2008.

Reuters