Home · On Dmitri Vrubel
Estate research
A sourced collection of voices around Dmitri Vrubel: not endorsements, but interpretations, memories and historical testimony that help locate the artist and his work in their time.
Direct quotations are kept short. Longer arguments are summarized and linked to the original source. This page will expand as the Estate verifies additional archival material.
“Vrubel and Timofeeva’s works perfectly illustrate this structure of contemporary belief.”
Writing on the Gospel Project, Groys reads its collision of Gospel text and international news imagery as a reflection on modern belief in the newness of news itself.
“These are all the best artists in the country.”
Guelman included Vrubel among the artists he described this way in 2013. His gallery had worked with Vrubel since the 1990s, and he later curated the Gospel Project at PERMM.
“Dmitri Vladimirovich, this would be good to paint on the Berlin Wall.”
Vrubel recalled that Prigov saw his early Brezhnev–Honecker sketches in Moscow and made the suggestion. They laughed about it; months later Vrubel arrived in Berlin and painted the image on the Wall.
“a contemporary legend”
Dudchenko’s remembrance traces Vrubel from direct online sales and news-feed imagery through the Gospel Project, Tolstoyevsky and VR, describing an artist continually trying to change how art could circulate and be experienced.
“one of the most important Berlin artists of the 21st century”
PANDA’s memorial text documents Vrubel and Timofeeva’s Open Studio, Tolstoyevsky and the first journeys through their virtual exhibitions — an important record of Vrubel’s later Berlin period beyond the Wall.
Critical reception
Selected criticism and retrospective writing — presented as reception, not as personal testimony.
Tolstova’s 2008 review reads the Gospel Project through its monumental use of press photography, advertising-scale vinyl and Gospel quotations.
Read source →Her 2022 obituary confronts the paradox of an artist with a much wider body of work being remembered publicly through a single globally famous image.
Read source →The Berlin obituary called Vrubel the “Brotherly Kiss painter and master of the Zeitgeist” and described the mural as a symbol of peace, love and crossing boundaries.
Read source →