Berlin street art

Berlin. Not an easy place to love. Destroyed, torn apart and painstakingly stitched back together. You either warm up to it or you don’t. In which case perhaps revisit its history first. But in any case, one thing Berlin has been doing well for some time now is street art. During my recent stay there I took a few pictures of some of the examples of Berlin’s ever-changing street tapestry, mainly in the uber-cool hipster paradise that is Kreuzberg.

Some of it is really well-known and well-documented, like the two gigantic murals painted by the Italian street artist called Blu on the sides of two adjacent buildings near the Schlesische Tor station:

Weirdly enough, I prefer my Instagram shot of the mural, with a “War of the Worlds” poster on a fence in front of it:

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Some of these gigantic murals appear out of nowhere:

Others need to be looked for. And this is the thing about Kreuzberg: on a good day, you can just walk for hours and search for those little gems, which – like the two examples below – may be hidden in private passages or side streets:

There’s everything there: from basic tags and meaningless scrawlings to really intricate or mind-blowingly beautiful paintings and murals:

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Sometimes you just see them where you would least expect them, like this rather drab-looking estate (or maybe you *would* expect it here more than anywhere else?):

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Even the dreadful tourist trap that is Checkpoint Charlie has a few examples of ‘street art’ on what is supposed to be the last remaining bits of the wall:

I wish I had more time to discover other, perhaps even more intriguing examples of street art in Berlin, but there’s always the mythical ‘next time’. In the meantime I’ll keep checking two of my favourite Berlin blogs: And Berlin, with its regular street art posts, and uberlin with its lovely photography.

And here comes the bonus pic, possibly NSFW.

The ‘thing’ went up 4 floors.

If anyone could explain this to me, I would be eternally grateful:

By Michal Dzierza

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