The exuberant paintings of the East Side Gallery, Berlin are often provocative, sometimes poke fun and often depict the dark side of the Communist regime.

The gallery sits on the banks of the River Spree in former East Berlin.   The ‘canvas’ is a 1.3km length of the Berlin Wall, one of the few remaining sections still standing. The gallery was founded in 1990, the year after the Wall came down, and features over 100 paintings from artists all over the world.

Naturally the Wall was loathed by the people of East Berlin; it was vandalised and scrawled with graffiti during the Communist era but the East Side Gallery, with its collection of bright paintings is a physical reminder of the regime that divided families and pulled friendships apart.

One of the most famous paintins is by Dmitri Vrubel of a kiss between Brezhnev, former Soviet leader and Honecker, former GDR leader.  The caption translates as My God, help me to survive this deadly love. 

You may think this painting is uber provocative but when Brezhnev visited in 1979 to celebrate the GDR’s 30th anniversary, the 2 leaders really did have a kiss. The embrace is supposed to represent happiness, fraternity and equality.  The irony of this seems to have escaped the men in the background who appear to be waiting their turn.

Birgit Kinder painted this Trabant crashing through the wall.  The little Trabant was the East German car of ‘choice’.  With a two stroke, 600cc engine it wasn’t going to go crashing through any walls but I think this painting manages to be both playful and powerfully symbolic. The registration is November 9th 1989, the date the wall was pulled down.

None of the paintings at the East Side Gallery today are the originals. They were erased by the authorities in 2009 as part of a restoration project to fix the damage caused by pollution and vandalism. The stunned artists were told they could repaint their work.  Easier said than done.

The future of the gallery is threatened because sections of it may be removed to make way for a luxury apartment block to be built behind the wall, on the river bank – the area which used to be the ‘Death Strip’.  The gallery runs alongside a busy road towards the Ostbahnhoff.  The area has undergone a lot of development but there are glimpses and echoes of how it used to be and whilst it’s great to have a huge new railway station and concert arena, I fear this gallery is going to disappear altogether eventually, submerged by shiny new buildings.

Here are just a small selection of the paintings featured at the East Side Gallery.