Les mères guidant la liberté. While autocracies destroy, we can create.
Fraternité
Les mères guidant la liberté. The Georgian revolution was the start. People in Tbilisi stood in the street for weeks with European flags, and watching from Munich I could not get rid of one thought: these people may feel more European than we do. We have to bring that together.
Not the flags
Yes, there are flags. But flags are not what people identify with. What held Europe together is clothing and strong women. The women who cleared the rubble after the wars. That is why on my wall it is the mothers who lead Liberty, and not the other way round.
I wanted to show that women are all the same, Russian or Ukrainian, French or Iranian. I took the images of modern revolutions, Russian ones and new ones, and united them in one picture. It is a composition of motifs that found itself.
The wall is not finished. It still has blurred places, and that is why everyone sees something of their own in it. A Ukrainian friend of mine stood in front of it and told me the story of the red ruta, the flower that blooms once a year and that you have to go looking for. How beautiful, she said. That is exactly it. She smiled.
Nothing here is self-evident
Our liberal, free values and our art are under massive threat from autocracies. Gerhard Richter and his generation came out of socialist realism and managed to make modern art feel self-evident, to free themselves from history. It is not self-evident. Art does not need a purpose, and that is a good thing. But art has power, and free artists should use that power to defend themselves.
Putin plays with images of a Russian identity. He wants to rewrite the history books, and once he has done it, he will have his worldview painted. Here the artists of liberal democracies have a head start. Autocracies can destroy. We can create something new. We are the light of the world. An artist can make pictures that others cannot see yet, and draw visions that then become reality. That is what mattered to me here.
Who owns a symbol
White flags. Red and white as the colours of Europe. Blue and yellow for Ukraine. A motif that does not burn in the fire. I want to know whom symbols belong to, who claims them for themselves, and whether a painting can take them back and put them into a shared context.
I am not interested in illustrating a political position. To say "this is the right opinion and everyone else is wrong" would be too easy for art. A picture can do something a tweet, a press release or a political statement cannot: it does not have to explain at once whose side someone is on. That tension is what interests me.
Not through galleries
I wanted to make this work big at a university, not through galleries, private exhibitions or social media. Because of who it is for. I want to reach demonstrators, former executives of German corporations and very wealthy people with the same picture. I have no appetite for a modern class struggle in the coming decade. I am trying to bring people together, and for that everyone has to move a little.
Grandfather
There is a personal line in this. My grandfather fought for freedom in Hungary. Students were shot, he had to flee, and he thought he would never see his family again. Europe was not even that free after the wall came down: he was still afraid to travel to Hungary. Oppression is bad, but it is the psychological violence that keeps us from being free. Against that you need a picture that welds people together.
When I painted this wall, Orbán was still in power. My grandfather would have cheered to see the Georgians in the street. When Hungary got a new head of government in the months that followed, I just stood in front of my picture and smiled. We may not have grasped it yet, but this is the future. Here it is, painted. This is how it will come.
