A new exhibition bringing together some of the most significant names in postwar German and post-Soviet art has opened at Beck & Eggeling gallery, offering a sweeping examination of how artists have grappled with war, displacement, ideology and historical rupture across six decades.

Art from War to War: Chasing Butterflies on the Verge of a Cliff, which opened on May 29, 2026, marks the first public presentation of selected works from the private collection of Kyiv-born collector Valeria Rodnianski. The exhibition features works by Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov, Irina Nakhova, A.R. Penck and other influential artists whose careers emerged amid the political and cultural upheavals of postwar Europe and the Soviet sphere.

Curated by Antonio Geusa and Kay Heymer, the exhibition traces a historical arc stretching from the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Rather than framing the works as a simple East-West comparison, the curators have organized the exhibition around broader questions of memory, identity, language and human experience.

The exhibition is divided into three thematic sections—Topos, Anthropos and Logos—which explore place, human existence and language as frameworks through which artists have responded to political pressure, censorship, war trauma and social transformation.

At the heart of the exhibition is a rare dialogue between German postwar artists and artists from the Soviet and post-Soviet world, groups that are often exhibited separately despite confronting many of the same historical tensions.

According to the curators, artists on both sides of the former Iron Curtain worked within systems shaped by competing ideological visions and the lingering effects of conflict. While the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union transformed the political landscape, the psychological and cultural consequences of those divisions continued to influence artistic practice long afterward.

The exhibition’s title draws inspiration from a poem by Italian poet Camillo Sbarbaro, who described chasing butterflies at the edge of a cliff as a metaphor for estrangement and uncertainty. Geusa and Heymer suggest that image captures a condition shared by many of the artists represented in the show: the experience of existing within periods of profound historical transition.

For Rodnianski, the collection reflects a personal journey across Ukraine, Germany, Russia and the broader post-Soviet world. Born and raised in Kyiv, she has said her understanding of twentieth-century history was shaped initially through family stories and literature before she encountered visual art as a powerful medium for exploring trauma and memory.

The collection was not assembled as a formal historical project. Instead, Rodnianski describes acquiring works that resonated with experiences and ideas she recognized intuitively. Over time, those acquisitions formed an unexpected conversation between German postwar art and post-Soviet artistic practices.

That connection took on heightened significance following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to Rodnianski, works acquired at different moments began to reveal a common concern: the vulnerability of human dignity in the face of historical and political forces.

The exhibition arrives amid renewed geopolitical tensions across Europe and offers a timely reflection on how artists have confronted violence, ideological fracture and collective memory. Rather than presenting history as a story of linear progress, the exhibition proposes art as a space where societies continue to wrestle with unresolved conflicts and competing interpretations of the past.

By bringing together works created across more than 60 years of political upheaval, Art from War to War: Chasing Butterflies on the Verge of a Cliff examines how the legacies of war and division persist long after political systems change—and how artists continue to make sense of those enduring fractures.

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