Dmitri Vrubel

Biography

The photograph was taken in 1979 by the Frenchman Régis Bossu: at the celebration of the GDR’s thirtieth anniversary, Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker exchange a “fraternal kiss”. Eleven years later the Moscow artist Dmitri Vrubel transferred this image to the concrete of the Berlin Wall, and to its eastern side at that, where before the fall of the Wall there had been no graffiti at all. The caption read: “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.” The title refers to those who died trying to get across the Wall.

The work on the Wall was arranged with the help of Alexander Brodovsky, a former guide and interpreter in the GDR. He was involved with contemporary art and had invited five artists from the USSR to put on the first exhibition of Soviet contemporary art in the GDR. The painting on the stretch that later became part of the East Side Gallery remained Vrubel’s best-known work.

Vrubel was born on 14 July 1960 in Moscow, into a family of engineers. He went to a school specialising in history, meant to become a historian, and wrote poetry. He painted his first picture, “The Judgement of Pilate”, at fifteen, in 1975. He learned drawing privately: in 1976 from Mikhail Epstein, then from Andrei Panchenko and Vladimir Ovchinnikov. In 1979 he entered the art and graphics department of the Lenin Moscow State Pedagogical Institute.

In the 1980s he joined the Moscow Club of Avant-gardists and in 1987 took part in its first exhibition. From 1986 to 1996 a gallery operated in his Moscow flat, called either the Vrubel Gallery or Kvart-Art; in the last Soviet years it hosted exhibitions held without any permission. He first went abroad in 1989 and spent two months in Paris. From 1990 he lived for long stretches in Berlin, and in 1993 he joined the Berlin artists’ union.

From 1995 he made almost everything together with Viktoria Timofeeva. Vrubel is counted among the Sots Art artists, that is, among those who take the language of the official image and turn it against itself. In 2001 the couple published a calendar, “Twelve Moods of the President”, with portraits of Vladimir Putin, which proved an unexpected success in Moscow. In 2002 they showed the exhibition “Putin and the ‘Black Square’” at the Mukha gallery, and in 2004–2005 the series “Portrait of an Era”. In 2008 their “Gospel Project” opened at the Central House of Artists, with Marat Gelman’s involvement: forty paintings in which images from conflict zones are combined with quotations from the Bible. In 2009 the exhibition was shown at the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Perm diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church condemned it. Later, in 2018, the project was exhibited in Bonn, in a former church.

That same year, 2009, brought him back to the Wall. For the twentieth anniversary of its fall the sections of the East Side Gallery were restored, his painting was erased, and Vrubel agreed to paint it again. The image had long been sold on souvenirs around the gallery, yet he said that the fee for this repainting was the only money the picture had ever brought him. To my mind, that is the best comment on the fate of his most reproduced work.

From 2010 Vrubel and Timofeeva lived permanently in Berlin and kept an open studio at the Panda Theater in the Kulturbrauerei cultural centre. In 2014 their exhibition “The Kuleshov Effect” was held at Winzavod, from 2016 they worked on the multi-part project “Tolstoevsky”, and in their last years they turned more and more to exhibitions in virtual reality: in 2020 their “Bunker”, part of the land art project “Cha Shcha: An Exhibition in the Woods”, existed both outside Moscow and online. Their works were included in the exhibition “Sots Art” at the Tretyakov Gallery and the Maison Rouge in Paris (2007–2008) and in “Kollektsia!” at the Centre Pompidou (2016–2017). They are held by the Centre Pompidou, the Berlin Nationalgalerie, the New Tretyakov Gallery and the State Centre for Contemporary Art.

Dmitri Vrubel died in Berlin on 13 August 2022, in his sixty-third year.