DUSSELDORF.- Art from War to War: Chasing Butterflies on the Verge of a Cliff unfolds across a historical arc marked by two violent turning points: the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Between these two thresholds lies a long and complex period shaped by ideological confrontation, political upheaval, and profound cultural transformation.
The exhibition brings together artists from Germany and from the Soviet and post-Soviet space contexts once separated by the Iron Curtain during the Cold War between the two victorious blocs of the Second World War. Many of these artists worked under conditions of censorship, ideological pressure, and historical trauma, while navigating the promises and failures of competing utopian visions. Even after 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved, the intellectual and psychological structures shaped by decades of division did not simply vanish. They transformed and persisted in new and often unexpected forms.
Rather than presenting a straightforward comparison between the two geographical areas, the exhibition creates a space of dialogue among the participating works. Organized into three thematic sections, Topos, Anthropos, and Logos, the show reflects on place, human experience, and language as key dimensions through which artists have responded to their times.
The title of the exhibition draws on a lyrical and unsettling metaphor from a poem by the Italian poet Camillo Sbarbaro, who described the act of chasing butterflies at the edge of a cliff as an image of estrangement from the way people’s lives unfold. This image resonates with the condition shared by many of the artists represented here. What connects postwar German artists with those from the Soviet and post-Soviet sphere is not simply the aftermath of collapsed empires, but a more persistent experience of displacement. Empires fall, borders shift, and political systems dissolve, yet artists often remain suspended within the ongoing process of historical transformation.
The German postwar artists were facing a specific challenge: they were forced to fight their own war trauma and were confronted, at the same time, with a new aesthetic ideology for which abstraction was propagated as the crucial metaphor for democratic and intellectual freedom. Artistic freedom was in a sense double edged. Working with literary, objective motives could raise suspicions and created problems of marginalization that dissolved only much later with the advent of postmodernism and a climate of “Anything Goes”.
The exhibition therefore avoids presenting history as a linear narrative of progress. Instead, it proposes art as a space in which societies grapple with trauma, imagine alternative futures, and shape the meanings through which the past will later be understood. In this context, the recent past and the present overlap. The suspended temporality of earlier conflicts continues to permeate the psychological and cultural atmosphere of the geopolitical tensions we inhabit today—reminding us that history is never fully past, but an unstable horizon that art persistently brings back into view.
--- Antonio Geusa and Kay Heymer
Valeria Rodnianski
Rooted in lived experience across the Soviet Union, Germany, Ukraine, and Russia, Valeria Rodnianski's collection represents a deeply personal reckoning with the history that has shaped her life and her family's. Born and raised in Kyiv, she first encountered the catastrophes of the twentieth century through family stories and literature.
It was in Germany that she discovered visual art could carry the same weight as literature. Artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, A. R. Penck, and Georg Baselitz demonstrated that trauma, memory, and guilt could be processed through image with equal and sometimes greater precision than through words.
The collection spans the period from 1961 to 2022, from the construction of the Berlin Wall to the full-scale war in Ukraine, and was not conceived as a deliberate historical project. It grew intuitively, guided by what Valeria describes as an almost physical sense of recognition: works that seemed to affirm thoughts not yet fully articulated.
At the heart of the collection lies a dialogue between two post-totalitarian experiences: postwar German and post-Soviet. Where German art confronted the past loudly and uncompromisingly, the art of the former Soviet Union spoke in a more coded language, one of survival within the system.
What connects these two traditions, Valeria argues, is not only shared history but a shared condition of displacement: the experience of living through rupture, when the familiar world has collapsed and a new one has yet to emerge.
Russia's aggression against Ukraine in 2022 brought the inner logic of the collection into sharp relief. Works acquired at different times revealed a common thread: the vulnerability of human dignity in the face of historical forces.
The exhibition is, in Valeria's words, both an opportunity to share work by artists she deeply values and an ethical gesture, an affirmation of human experience and artistic reflection in a world where political systems repeatedly seek to subordinate the individual.
Beck & Eggeling
With over 30 years of excellence in the international art market,
Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art has established itself as one of Germany's leading galleries, with a distinguished legacy spanning impressionist, expressionist, and postwar modernist works alongside a dynamic contemporary art program.
The gallery's commitment to scholarship is reflected in more than 150 publications produced by its in-house art publishers, featuring texts by prominent authors and contributing to broader art historical knowledge.
Beyond the gallery walls, Beck & Eggeling has spearheaded major international projects, including Heinz Mack's The Sky over Nine Columns across Venice, Istanbul, Valencia, and St. Moritz from 2014 to 2018, and Magdalena Abakanowicz's Crowd and Individual in Venice in 2015.
Kay Heymer
Kay Heymer is a German curator and art historian specialising in modern and contemporary art. He served as head of Modern Art at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf and has also been affiliated with the Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst in Duisburg and the Stiftung für Kunst und Kultur in Bonn.
He organised the major exhibition David Hockney: Exciting Times Are Ahead at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn in 2001. He is co-author, alongside Marco Livingstone, of Hockney's Portraits and People, a study of David Hockney's lifelong engagement with portraiture.
Heymer is regarded as a distinguished European voice in art criticism and curatorial practice, with a particular focus on modern and contemporary works.
Antonio Geusa
Dr. Antonio Geusa is an art historian, curator, and lecturer specializing in contemporary art. He holds a PhD in Media Arts from the University of London. His work moves between research, curating, and institutional collaboration.
He has served as an adjunct curator at the Tate in London and has lectured or provided curatorial and strategic consultancy for major cultural institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the MoMA, BOZAR, The Photographers’ Gallery, and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
His research, particularly his widely cited study on the history of Russian video art, focuses on the intersections of artistic practice, new media, and social transformation. He is the recipient of the Innovation Prize and The Art Newspaper Russia Award.
Complete list of exhibited artists
Yuri Albert, Nikita Alekseev, Georg Baselitz, Peter Bömmels, Grisha Bruskin, Erik Bulatov, Olga Chernysheva, Valery Chtak, Ivan Chuikov, Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, Elena Elagina, Boris Groys, Ilya Kabakov, Anselm Kiefer, Irina Korina, Sasha Kutovyi, Valery Koshlyakov, Markus Lüpertz, Igor Makarevich, Marwan, Pavlo Makov, Boris Mikhailov, Andrey Monastyrsky, Irina Nakhova, Albert Oehlen, Boris Orlov, A.R. Penck, Pavel Pepperstein, Viktor Pivovarov, Sigmar Polke, Dmitry Prigov, Gerhard Richter, Alexander Roytburd, Aidan Salakhova, Günther Uecker, Vadim Zakharov.
