“It seemed as if I was in between Brezhnev’s and Honecker’s lips.”
Russian artist Dmitry Vrubel was born in Moscow (Soviet Union) in 1960. His acclaimed Wall painting “Mein Gott, hilf mir, diese tödliche Liebe zu überleben” (“My God, help me to conquer this deadly love”) captures a kiss between the communist heads-of-state Honecker and Brezhnev.
Dmitry Vrubel in the interview
Vrubel’s famous Wall painting “Mein Gott, hilf mir, diese tödliche Liebe zu überleben” (“My God, help me to conquer this deadly love”) shows GDR head-of-state Erich Honecker and Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev kissing. The artist painted the image from a press photograph of 1979. While painting it, he has said, he felt as if he were caught between the lips of the two “disgusting old men”. The work was razed during the Gallery’s restoration in 2009. After initially refusing to restore it, Vrubel then repainted it on the Wall.
Vrubel studied at the the Moscow Lenininstitut’s faculty of art and graphic design and ran an art gallery in his Moscow home before moving to Berlin in 1990. A concept artist, he calls his method of reproducing images taken from the internet “multimedia-graffiti”. His works in the East Side Gallery earned him international acclaim as a painter. He lives in Berlin where he runs a gallery with his wife.