The world has changed immensely in the thirty years since Thierry Noir first painted on the Berlin Wall in 1984. Although the Cold War is long over, Thierry still feels his art has a role to play in brightening up people’s lives.

He compares experience of feeling trapped like a sardine in today’s London to the immense pressure he felt in West Berlin, surrounded by the city’s suffocating walls, that first provoked him to paint as a way of finding release.

Huck caught up with the French artist in London as he unveiled a retrospective of the last three decades of his work at the Howard Griffin Gallery.