30 Facts About Thierry Noir

Thierry Noir was born on 1958 and is a French artist and muralist based in Berlin.

Thierry Noir is considered the first artist to paint the Berlin Wall in the 1980s.

Thierry Noir created brightly-colored paintings across large spans of the Berlin Wall and some of these original paintings can still be seen on surviving segments of the Wall in art collections and on the East Side Gallery.

Noir's work and style are now considered iconic, and Noir is regarded as one of the forerunners of the street art movement as a whole.

Thierry Noir continues to create murals worldwide in cities including London, Los Angeles, and Sydney.

Thierry Noir was inspired by musicians David Bowie, Nina Hagen, and Iggy Pop who lived in West Berlin at the time.

Thierry Noir initially lived in a squat in Mariannenplatz overlooking the Berlin Wall.

In 1984, Thierry Noir began painting the Berlin Wall with fellow French artist, Christophe-Emmanuel Bouchet.

Thierry Noir himself noted that painting large images on the Wall had been seen as a "taboo, even among alternative people".

Thierry Noir had to paint quickly and surreptitiously to avoid being caught by the Genztruppen.

Thierry Noir collaborated with Irish rock group U2, who commissioned him to paint a series of six Trabant cars for their 1992 Zoo TV Tour.

Thierry Noir's Trabants were incorporated into the lighting rigs for the tour, and images of them were used as cover art for U2 singles including "The Fly" and "Mysterious Ways".

One of Thierry Noir's Trabants was featured on the cover of U2's album, Achtung Baby.

Thierry Noir traveled to London in 2013 to collaborate with the UK artist, STIK, on a large mural on the Village Underground in Shoreditch and to deliver a public lecture at Somerset House on the history of street art.

Thierry Noir worked with Dulwich Picture Gallery on a reinterpretation of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's baroque masterpiece Joseph Receiving Pharaoh's Ring, which is a part of the Gallery's permanent collection as a mural in Dulwich Park.

Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2014, Thierry Noir staged a retrospective exhibition in London.

That year, Thierry Noir was commissioned by the Museum of London to create a mural on the museum's rotunda entrance and was commissioned by the Embassy of Germany to the UK to paint a mural in London's Belgrave Square to commemorate the 25th anniversary.

Thierry Noir painted the interior of the former East German Embassy building at 34 Belgrave Square.

Thierry Noir donated a painting to the German Consulate in the United States.

In London, Thierry Noir painted a 37-metre high tower block in Acton which was considered the tallest mural in Britain.

Thierry Noir's painted Berlin Wall segments are on permanent display in private and public collections worldwide.

Several of Thierry Noir's artworks are part of permanent museum collections, including at the Allied Museum in Berlin, the Newseum in Washington, DC, the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, the Wende Museum in Los Angeles, and the Migration Museum in London, where an adjacent segment is painted by Stik.

In 2013 during the Art Basel Fair in Miami, Florida, Thierry Noir repainted four original segments of the Berlin Wall, which are now in the public art collection of Ironside district.

Later in 2019, Thierry Noir presented a newly painted segment of the Wall in Plovdiv, Bulgaria to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Plovdiv's status as a European Capital of Culture in 2019.

Thierry Noir met Wenders on a number of occasions at a local restaurant where he would sell some of his artwork.

In 2000, Thierry Noir was featured in the German documentary Nach dem Fall, in which he discussed his art and the importance of the Wall to Berlin only a decade after its fall.

Thierry Noir has participated in the Berlin Festival of Lights since 2014.

In 2015, Thierry Noir worked with drinks firm Hennessy to create custom bottle labels with sale proceeds going to the Centrepoint charity for homeless youth.

In 2016, Thierry Noir partnered with the audio equipment manufacturer Rega on a series of seven hand-painted Rega RP1 turntables.

Thierry Noir is considered one of the forerunners of the street art movement as a whole.