Berlin Street Art: Murals

Last one! I didn't get them all finished before leaving Berlin, but at least they'll be done before leaving Germany. Murals can generally be grouped in with some of the other categories, but Berlin is really exceptional at large, building-covering murals so I felt they warranted a special post. Much of the housing in Berlin is attached homes, and when one of the homes got damaged they just demolished it and left big, blank, windowless canvases of brick on the adjacent units. Some of these have murals painted on them legally, and some not so legally, but with so many artists in Berlin trying to stand out there's no shortage of people looking to do make their work big.

A post on Berlin murals has to begin with the Italian artist Blu. He's paintings are huge, and if anybody visits Berlin and doesn't see at least one of them they are trying pretty hard to avoid the most interesting parts of the city.

These murals by Blu have been done over the last 5 years, so they have been a presence in the city for a long time (in street art terms, at least). The first two here are adjacent to each other over an overgrown empty lot that is now full of people squatting in tents.

This astronaut is by Victor Ash. It looks almost like a stencil, but it was done by marking a grid on the wall and then painstakingly filling in each square of the grid based on a smaller version. There is a car lot across the street, and at night (I'm told) the spotlight on the lot projects the shadow of one of the lot's flags so it looks like the astronaut is holding it.

I mentioned in the sticker post that one of them would be familiar soon, and this is why. They are by a group called The London Police, and as seen their work ranges from the very small to the very large.

I mentioned in my earlier posts visiting an interesting industrial urban space full of street art, bars and clubs. I later found out that this area used to be a train depot that was abandoned and converted into its current form. It has many great murals, but I'm not going to try figuring out all the artists right now.

Here's an assortment of other big murals from around the city.