Valeria Rodnianski’s collection began with a generation, not a strategy.
The Kyiv-born, Germany-based collector says her earliest purchases were made in the early 1990s, when she was still living in Kyiv and responding to the energy of young artists coming of age after the Soviet collapse. Among those first acquisitions were early works by Ilya Chichkan. What she bought then, she suggests, became the groundwork for everything that followed.
That private history is now visible in public for the first time. Rodnianski’s collection opened last month at Beck & Eggeling in Düsseldorf in an exhibition titled Art from War to War: Chasing Butterflies on the Verge of a Cliff, on view until August 15. The presentation brings together postwar German artists and artists from the former Soviet Union, spanning a period from the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to the gallery’s statement, the aim is to create “a rare dialogue between German and Eastern European artistic positions that are often exhibited separately.”
Rodnianski’s holdings include works by Anselm Kiefer, Pavlo Makov, Vadim Zakharov, and Jonathan Meese. Asked about her most recent purchase, she named Zakharov’s Icons of Hell, which she said entered into a conversation with Meese’s Grosse Tyrannen, acquired in 2009. For Rodnianski, the pairing is not simply formal. Both works address power, mythology, and collective belief, though they do so through very different visual and intellectual languages.
Her remarks also point to a collector’s paradox: decisions may be made quickly, but collections are shaped over years by what is acquired, what is missed, and what is lost. Rodnianski says she would most like to own a major work by Kiefer, whose engagement with history and memory has long resonated with her. She also hopes to acquire another significant work by Makov, whom she describes as one of the most important Ukrainian artists of his generation and still underrecognized internationally. One of the two Makov works she once owned was lost over the years.
If the Düsseldorf exhibition offers one clear lesson, it is that Rodnianski’s collection is not built around a single geography. It is organized instead by a sustained interest in historical pressure, cultural memory, and the uneasy space between German and Eastern European art since 1961. That framework gives the show its force, and suggests why the collection feels less like a fixed archive than an ongoing argument.
