“The feeling of painting on the East German side of the Wall was weird. […] When you know all the history, it’s a strange feeling.”
Mirta Domacinovic was born in Vinkovci, Yugoslavia (Croatia) in 1961. She emigrated with her family to West Germany in 1981. A freelance artist, she lives in Frankfurt am Main and Austria. Her painting “Zeichen in der Reihe” shows symbols of war, torture, rape, and dictatorship.
Mirta Domacinovic in the interview
Domacinovic’s “Zeichen in der Reihe” (Signs in a row) shows a set of abstract pictograms symbolising war, torture, rape, and dictatorship, such as barbed wire, a prison cell, a wreath, and a foetus. The painting expresses Domacinovic’s concerns about the volatile situation and increasingly nationalist tendencies in Yugoslavia at the time. Several Wall sections with her painting on them were removed after 1990 to provide access to the building land behind. In 2022 they were remounted not far from their original site.
Domacinovic enrolled to study art at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach in 1982 and studied painting for a time at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart. She looks back on the experience of painting on the once strictly guarded, untouchable Berlin Wall as special and strange.
