Dmitri Vrúbel, author of the kiss between Honnecker and Brezhnev at the Berlin Wall, dies

The author of the famous graffiti of the kiss between the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the President of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Erich Honecker He has died in Berlin, according to German media reports on Monday.

Dmitri Vrubel (Moscow, 1960) was a Russian plastic artist whose most famous work was the graffiti he painted on the Berlin Wall shortly after it fell, in the spring of 1991, and which has since become one of the main tourist attractions of the German capital. Located on the stretch of wall known as the “East Side Gallery” in the Old East, the painting shows Brezhnev and Honecker kissing on the mouth, with a caption that reads in German and Russian “My God, help me to survive this deadly love”.

In an interview in Euronews, the artist – who ceded all the rights to his work by signing the contract to paint on the wall without reading it – details that it was the newspapers who gave the work its name when they put it on the front page: “Bruderkuss”, ‘Kiss of brothers’. “This mural is dedicated to love, to the image of love. We can all find ourselves in a similar situation, trapped between the lips of these kinds of monsters,” he explained.

the wall, removed in 2009 as part of the restoration of the wall and replicated after by the artist at the request of the local authorities, was inspired by a photograph showing the two communist leaders celebrating 30 years of existence of the GDR, in 1979.

In 2001, Vrúbel and his wife, fellow artist Victoria Timofeyeva, created a calendar with portraits of the Russian president, Vladimir Putinwhich they called “Putin’s 12 Moods”which unexpectedly became a bestseller in Russia.

A descendant of the modernist pioneer Mikhail Vrubel, the artist had lived in Berlin since 1990 and in recent years was active in the ranks of the pirate party; He died last Sunday at the age of 62 from heart complications after contracting COVID-19.