Thierry Noir, French artist first to paint on the Berlin Wall, now showing in Hong Kong

French artist Thierry Noir’s paintings pop with the colourful cartoonish characters that have come to define him. The characters – featuring big heads, elongated faces, bulging lips – exude a sense of fun, which is ironic considering the inspiration for the imagery was born almost half a century ago in Berlin at a time when the divided city was at the heart of the Cold War. Noir is credited as being the first artist to paint on the Berlin Wall, which stretched 155km (96 miles) to divide communist East Germany and the democratic West. “Painting the colourful long faces and big heads was a sort of physical reaction against the pressure of daily life near the Berlin Wall,” says Noir, who between 1984 and 1989 covered about 5km of the wall with his art. At the time, he had no idea of the mark he would leave, not just on the wall but on the global contemporary art scene. Today, he is considered a pioneer of the street art movement. “We called street art graffiti back then,” he says. Today Noir’s murals can be found from London (The Acton Giant) to Los Angeles (Freedom Boulevard) to Sydney (The Colourful House of Surry Hills). His work also pops up in pop culture: a scene in the 1987 film Wings of Desire by German filmmaker Wim Wenders features his distinctive heads, and his art appears on the cover of U2’s 1991 album Achtung Baby. This month, “Thierry Noir: Rush Hour” – the artist’s biggest project in Asia to date – sees simultaneous exhibitions running in Hong Kong and Tokyo until July 31. Hosted by Phillips auction house, the exhibitions feature rarely seen early works from the 1980s – many never before shown outside Europe – juxtaposed with new paintings and site-specific murals created exclusively for the project. At Phillips’ gallery space in Hong Kong, located opposite M+ in the West Kowloon Cultural District, the audience can see how Noir’s motifs have evolved over the decades. A 2025 piece, called A certain day-to-day approach to the situation gives me complete control over my entire development, measures 150cm x 120cm and features one of Noir’s colourful characters holding a flower. Next to it are earlier versions of the work in a 24cm x 30cm postcard format that Noir painted in the late ’80s. The imagery might ring a bell for Hongkongers. In 2021, digital animations from Noir’s “Gold” series exploring the commonalities between sport and art were shown on the big screen on the side of department store Sogo in the city’s Causeway Bay neighbourhood. Back in Europe, Noir’s “relationship” with the Berlin Wall started in 1982 when, aged 23, he left his native France with a one-way ticket to West Berlin. Back then, the city – controlled by the United States, Britain and France before the reunification of Germany in 1990 – was worlds apart from communist East Berlin, and served as a magnet for artists and anarchists riding the new wave movement. It was the perfect fit for Noir, a child of the punk rock counterculture raised on the sounds of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. For the first couple of years, Noir lived with about 50 people in Georg von Rauch Haus, a former hospital that was abandoned because of its proximity to the Berlin Wall. While most people saw the wall, which rose four metres (13ft) into the sky, as a symbol of oppression, Noir saw it as a boring canvas that he needed to paint. To sustain his free-spirited lifestyle, he also painted and sold postcards that he made using cardboard. “I would drive to the centre of West Berlin, where all the nice restaurants were, and sell my paintings and postcards,” he recalls. “People would say, ‘Oh, you are the Berlin Wall guy.’” In a way, he still holds that title, with his latest exhibition harnessing the excitement he felt decades earlier when he broke the law to paint the wall. “Rush Hour is about living in a constant state of motion,” says Noir. “But it’s also about how that intensity connects back to the urgency I felt painting the Berlin Wall. Many years later, the same energy is still there, just transformed.” Noir played a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with border guards stationed along the wall who were there to prevent East Germans from escaping to West Berlin. Noir’s symbols of resistance and resilience angered them. “I would get on the border guards’ nerves because they were under no-shoot orders, and I knew that, so they would scream ‘Stop! We see you!” he says. “With my spray can I had to paint some heads very quickly.” Wandering around the gallery space, Noir points to a painting titled A moment of magic saves me precious time that is part of his “Crocodile” series. The reptile is a common motif in his work, used as a metaphor for the wall’s dangerous and oppressive presence. It is important to remember that between 1961 and 1989, at least 140 people were killed or died at the wall. “It was not just a painted concrete wall but a deadly machine, a sort of big crocodile ready to kill people,” Noir says. For Noir, painting crocodiles in his style on the Berlin Wall made it less intimidating and more absurd, challenging its power and the fear it instilled. Today, segments of the Berlin Wall painted by Noir are dispersed globally, with notable pieces in public and private collections, museums, and public art displays. One piece is at Berlin’s East Side Gallery, a former stretch of the wall that is now the world’s longest open-air art gallery. In November 2004, on the 15th anniversary of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the city of Berlin donated a section of the wall mural titled Homage to Liberty to Battery Park City in New York. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Thierry Noir (@thierrynoir) While Noir may have been the first, he was not the only artist to leave his mark on the wall. Others to create art on the wall included American pop artist Keith Haring and Russian painter Dmitri Vrubel, who painted The Mortal Kiss – a mural depicting a symbolic embrace between then Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker. The official dismantling of the Berlin Wall started on November 9, 1989 – and Noir was there to witness it. “I spent the whole night celebrating that crazy moment and the drink of the night was Wodka Gorbatschow,” says Noir, referring to a German vodka brand that has been produced in Berlin since 1921. “It was perfect.” Thierry Noir: Rush Hour, Phillips, G/F, WKCDA Tower, West Kowloon Cultural District, 8 Austin Road West, Kowloon. Tel: 2318 2000

Thierry Noir, French artist first to paint on the Berlin Wall, now showing in Hong Kong

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Thierry Noir, who covered the Berlin Wall with his hallmark cartoons, is showing both old and new works at Phillips’ gallery space

Thierry Noir, who covered the Berlin Wall with his hallmark cartoons, is showing both old and new works at Phillips’ gallery space