On Sunday, August 14, the artist Dmitry Vrubel died, known around the world as the author of the graffiti on the Berlin Wall “Brotherly Kiss, or Lord! Help me survive among this mortal love”, depicting a kiss between the head of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Leonid Brezhnev and the leader of the GDR Erich Honecker.

Dmitry Vrubel fell ill with coronavirus at the end of June, the illness was severe, he was hospitalized. On July 17, his wife, artist Viktoria Timofeeva, wrote on Facebook that Vrubel was placed in an artificial coma and a ventricular circulatory assist device was installed on him, as his heart could no longer cope on its own under diseased conditions.

“Kiss Brezhnev” and not only

Dmitry Vrubel was born in 1960 in Moscow. At age 15, he painted his first painting, The Trial of Pilate. In 1979 he studied at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute at the Faculty of Art and Graphics. Since 1983 – member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. In 1990, he created his famous graffiti at the East Side Gallery in East Berlin. In 2010, Vrubel left Russia and settled in Germany.

In recent years, he has been involved in virtual exhibitions. The artist’s plans included the creation of an “Events Museum”, which would cover and understand important current news from an art point of view, including through tours that the visitors would take themselves and their video reports on social networks.

In 2017, Vrubel and Timofeeva gave an interview to DW, in which they said: “We drew the beginning of Putinism, so we will also trace the end anyway, if God allows us to live until this moment.” “The first major exhibition of contemporary Russian art must be in the Lubyanka, as in the Stasi buildings. The Lubyanka must become the biggest artistic occupation in the world. But first, all these documents from the Reich Chancellery must be taken out for archiving.”, Dmitry Vrubel said then.