The East Site Gallery is an open air, modern art gallery, painted on some of the remaining sections of the Berlin wall. When the wall was enforced by East Germany, West Berliner’s would graffiti their side of the wall with slogans and images. The east side of the wall had a guarded ‘death strip’  to prevent East Berliners crossing, so their side of the wall was plain. This gallery is symbolic because it is on the east side of the wall, expressing the freedom of East Berliners and the unification of East and West Germany in 1989 when the wall ‘fell’.

Enough naive artistic analysis. Onto the graffiti.

We saw some of the more famous artworks like My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love by Dmitri Vrubel. It’s a painting of the fraternal kiss between the leader of East Germany and the leader of the Soviet Union when celebrating the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the German Democratic Republic back in 1979.

And many more amazing works.

While we were on an art kick, we decided to visit a graffiti ally that we were told about on the walking tour. Street art was a natural development from the slogans and artwork that were painted on the Berlin Wall. The ally was a bit hard to find, but once found, we were impressed.

We even found a few underground artists while we were looking out for an Invader that we were promised to find ( which we didn’t).

The first one was xoooox. He does stencils of glamorous woman on the oldest, most run down buildings, he can find. I sure there is a bit more to it, but either way they stand out.

The second artist was Mein Liber Prost, who just makes me smile!

The art was great, however the main reason for coming to Berlin was for New years! We ended up near the Brandenburg Gate on the stroke of midnight and the crowd atmosphere was a lot of fun.

One of the best bits was the fireworks – everyone had some and it was crazy and close range.

What a scary and amazing New Years!

One more blog post from Berlin coming up about some of the amazing museums there.

Until then…