Formerly in the heart of ‘East’ Germany, the Neues Leben of the show’s title refers to the main East German Publishing House, active until 1989, when the state collapsed. On my visits to Leipzig I had seen many fading murals from DDR(East Germany) time on the ends of buildings extoling the virtues of Soviet Life. For example“Those who go with the Soviet union will be the winners in History” on the post office as well as more mundane celebrations of youth groups or straight DDR advertising. These murals are very old fashioned but also quite beautiful, and are rapidly dissapearing under the massive construction in the city. Now the city is like any other major European conurbation, saturated with ‘capitalist’ advertising of every imaginable kind and in every place. I wanted to make a mural for this project, using this completely anachronistic medium. The modern ‘murals’ of capitalism are computer generated and are printed on a fine mesh which is then stretched over the building in use. However, I wanted my mural to hark back to the pedagogic certainty of the previous era, painted directly on to the surface of the wall. The entreaties of the communist era have been replaced by the mantra of late capitalism. I wanted to propose a new idea, a new space which the casual viewer could consider, but in this old media that people were strangely sentimental about . In translation, the text reads:

REAL LIFE AND HOW TO LIVE IT

DO/NOT