The ephemeral intervention of Keith Haring on the Berlin Wall

November 11, 2019 at 09:47 hrs.


The ephemeral intervention of Keith Haring on the Berlin Wall


When the Charlie Checkpoint Museum called for Keith Haring in 1986, el Berlin Wall He had been dividing this German city for several decades.

From the western side, artists made pints and graffiti.

Thus they defied the guards of East Berlin who guarded their side of the wall.

This became an act of symbolic protest against what the wall represented within the city.

In this context it was that the Charlie Checkpoint Museum, the most notorious border crossing in the city, decided to invite the American artist Keith Haring.

A mural of only one day

 

Keith Haring was traveling through Europe, and Rainer Hildebrandt, the museum's director, invited him to intervene the Wall.

Throughout one night, museum workers painted 100 meters of wall in yellow.

The next day, on a six-hour day, Keith Haring painted a series of intertwined figures in red and black, replicating the colors of the German flag.

Both the museum and the media in West and East Germany gave great publicity to the artist's work.

Keith Haring gave interviews, documented the work process and gave a press conference, focusing on a positive unit message.

Gray paint over colors

 

The day after Haring finished his mural, large sections appeared covered in gray paint.

This was possibly A political protest from local artists. 

For they would see Haring's intervention and speech as a frivolization of its causes.

In a short time Keith Haring's strokes were covered by the different layers that characterize the impermanence of graffiti.

This mutability of strokes and posters on the imposition that represented the Berlin Wall would continue until the November 9th 1989.

Date on which East Berlin declared that it would allow the free transit of its citizens.

And in which the Berliners began to demolish that wall with so many stories and so many traces to their credit.
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