Thierry Noir valuation
The first artist to paint the Berlin Wall, in fast cartoon heads, from 1984.
Thierry Noir was born in Lyon in 1958 and moved to West Berlin in 1982 with no plan, living in a squat beside the Wall in Kreuzberg.
What a work by Thierry Noir is worth
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Bio
Thierry Noir was born in Lyon in 1958 and moved to West Berlin in 1982 with no plan, living in a squat beside the Wall in Kreuzberg. In 1984 he began painting it — illegally, since the Wall itself stood on East German territory — using paint donated by neighbours and working fast, because the border guards could and did cross to arrest people. Speed produced the style: two colours, thick black outline, enormous simplified heads in profile. He painted well over a kilometre of it before 1989, and appeared in Wings of Desire.
The market divides between studio paintings on canvas and board, which are the main body of work, and genuine painted Wall segments, which appear occasionally and carry substantial documentation and logistical questions of their own. There is a print output in screenprint and giclee, and a quantity of painted objects and collaborative product. Because the imagery is simple, widely reproduced and easy to imitate, studio documentation and provenance matter more than they otherwise would. Signature and date are on the face; the flat acrylic surfaces are unvarnished and scuff easily.
The East Side Gallery and U2's Trabants
Noir began painting the Wall in 1984 with another French artist, Christophe-Emmanuel Bouchet. After it came down he was one of the artists invited to paint the East Side Gallery in 1990, and in June that year 33 painted sections carrying his work were sold in Monte Carlo and dispersed to collections around the world. For U2's Zoo TV tour of 1992 he painted six Trabant cars, which appeared on the covers of the singles The Fly and Mysterious Ways.
In London he painted with Stik at Village Underground in Shoreditch in 2013 and took part in the Dulwich Outdoor Gallery the same year, and in 2019 the two painted Wall segments shown outside the Imperial War Museum. A painted Wall segment should come with documentation of where it stood and when he painted it.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
