Original artwork description:

A rift… In history, deep in the subconscious, in human destinies, in space, in the perception of reality…

I endow all my paintings with deep and multidimensional meanings because that is how life is – complex and multiparadigmatic, and that is how people are – ambivalent and multidimensional. Also I realize that I cannot endow one image with only one meaning because, from the interaction of each character in the frame with another, it acquires new meanings; it exists simultaneously in different historical dimensions and carries different metaphorical and allegorical loads.

This painting thematizes Berlin because I love this city and feel an inner response to it. For me, Berlin is a unique phenomenon where something incredible, modern, powerful, free, and creative was able to grow from ashes and ruins. A story of the Phoenix.

While walking through Berlin, I listened to that invisible scar weaving through its spaces, which remained in its history and in its consciousness. I listened to the huge cancerous tumor that once grew in the middle of the city's organism. And though it may – naively – seem that this tumor has been destroyed, the metastases remain. And they tempt the heirs of the USSR not only to restore this tumor but also to devour the entire affected organism. For me, these are quite obvious things. And seeing – as a Ukrainian – the exorbitantly expenses of naivety and gullibility, I would not want Berlin to repeat the fate of the cities in eastern Ukraine.

This painting invites the viewer to reflect on the deep scars of history and the price of lessons we have already forgotten.

Materials used:

Acrylic, Metall, Structural Paste, Gold Leaf, Coins, Banknotes, Threads