An exhibition of selected works from the Valeria Rodnianski collection at Beck & Eggeling gallery curated by Antonio Geusa and Kay Heymer

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 morepersiste...

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 und were confronted, at the same time, with a new aesthetic ideology for with 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.

Yuri Albert, Georg Baselitz, Peter Bömmels, Grisha Bruskin, Olga Chernysheva, Valery Chtak, Vladimir Dubossarsky, Marwan, Anselm Kiefer, Valery Koshlyakov, Sasha Kutovyi, Markus Lüpertz, Igor Makarevich, Pavlo Makov, Jonathan Meese, Boris Mikhailov, Andrey Monastyrsky, Albert Oehlen, A. R. Penck, Pavel Pepperstein, Sigmar Polke, Neo Rauch, Gerhard Richter, Alexander Roytburd, Aidan Salakhova, Günther Uecker, Vadim Zakharov