The East Side Gallery is a 1.3 Km stretch of the Berlin Wall in the former East Berlin district of Friedrichshain. For visiting, the nearest S-bahn stations are Ostbanhof and Warschauer Straße. This preserved section of wall has become an open air gallery with over 100 paintings which are free to view 24 hours a day. Work here began in 1990, shortly after the fall of the wall, and involved over a hundred different artists from all over the world. The paintings are actually on what would have been the east side of the wall although the actual border between East and West Berlin was the nearby River Spree. The reverse side of the wall is covered in graffiti which makes for an interesting contrast.
Over the years since their creation many paintings have been affected by weathering, graffiti and even vandalism. As a result restoration work has been undertaken.
The gallery can get very busy as it is one of the top tourist attractions in the city. We got there around 9.30am and it was relatively quiet but coaches started to arrive from around 10 o’clock and there was then much competition for photographs.
For this post words are not really necessary. I’ll let the works speak for themselves. Note that some of the photos only show sections of a much larger work.
