Tristan and Isolde

The fact that I painted the series of Tristan and Isolde was in fact due to Michal Sergeyevich Gorbachev. The realm of evil, in which we’d lived our lives, suddenly got free of the curse. The iron curtains, barbed wires and walls gave way and the civilised world became curious about what and who was actually within. Grants and invitations followed for the painters from the Soviet Union, to visit Europe and exhibit there. Non-conformist artists opposing the official ideology and the aesthetics of socialist realism got a chance. The greatest of the dissident painters (Ilya Kabakov, Michal Shemyakin, Boris Lekar, David Merecki, and others) immediately moved to Paris, New York or Jerusalem. They had the greatest ambitions to present themselves as the heirs of 1920s Russian avantgarde.
Those who were not that courageous were happy even to be invited for shorter creative sojourns. Thus I happened to arrive at the Catholic academy in the town of Schwerte to stay for two months. Besides breakfasts, lunches and suppers, the hospitable academy offered to get us acquainted with German culture. We were brought by coach to visit a convent in the town of Celle, where once a year a collection of tapestries can be seen by anybody interested, and they come from all over the world. I really don’t know why I was so affected. I saw a tapestry with the subject of Tristan and Isolde, created by the nuns at the time of the “dark Middle Ages”. A tapestry free from mysticism and religious fanaticism. It was about a youth capable of killing a dragon, or challenge knight Marold successfully, but helpless in love and easy prey to human envy. Then I had a dream in which the nuns in the gloomy space of a Gothic cathedral nave were sitting around a huge table, embroidering the scenes of the love story of an Irish princess and a German knight. They were laughing and talking, saying how they would enjoy Isolde’s position, with their fingertips stroking Tristan, wounded in yet another feat. There was even Tristan half-naked in a tub, washed by women, in whom the nuns depicted themselves. When the tapestry and thus the story was finished, when the black sail of the nave vault killed the last hope of a happy ending, all those women, old and young, beautiful and ugly, were sitting silently in the Gothic space with their cheeks wet...