Thierry Noir was born in 1958 in Lyon, France and first camed to Berlin in January 1982.
In April 1984 he started to paint the Berlin Wall with fellow artist Christophe Bouchet.
Noir and Bouchet, two young French men living close to the wall, decided to paint the Berlin Wall as “a sort of physical reaction against the pressure of the daily life near the Berlin Wall.”
They would routinely paint large pieces over the entire three metre height of the Wall, painting as fast as possible since painting the Wall was a highly illegal act. The Berlin Wall was built three metres beyond the official border between East and West Germany so the East-German soldiers had authority to arrest any person standing near the Wall, let alone painting But why make the Berlin Wall a beautiful thing?
In Thierry’s own words his “object [was] not to embellish the wall but to demystify it’” . Painting the Wall was “one real revolutionary act: to paint the Berlin Wall, to transform it, to make it ridiculous, to help destroy it”.
Thierry Noir’s iconic works on the Berlin Wall camed to become a symbol of new-found freedom after the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War. Thierry Noir recalls how “after the end of the wall, the wall paintings became from one day to another something sacred, with an incalculable value.”