"Not a Dream" is an exhibition devoted to the most recent works of two outstanding visual artists, Vlada Ralko and Volodymyr Budnikov, and their experience of the first months of total war in their country. The scenography specially imagined by Aurélie Maestre offers a raw encounter with the works and a direct confrontation with the reality they depict. This exhibition is a non-commercial event, supported by the Peace for Art Foundation and hosted by the ArtEast Gallery.

The series "Diary of Lviv" by Vlada Ralko and "Time of War" by Volodymyr Budnikov were created in 2022, first in Lviv where the artists took refuge at the beginning of the conflict and then in exile in Berlin. Created in a moment of crisis, the graphic works convey a sense of brutality and distress. The repetitive use of quick strokes sets the tone for the series. They are as much part of the drawing as they are a flaw, a crack, an erasure. From the accumulation of these sharp and tight lines, forms appear like visions.

These visions take the shape of mutating beings, acts of cannibalization, struggling bodies. They depict a humanity grappling with its own fears of past and present. Yet these nightmares, carried by abstraction in Budnikov’s works and by phantasmagoria in Ralko’s, appear to be real. Physical elements such as skeletons, genitals, or muscles give the images a deep and intimate bodily presence, which chills the viewer’s blood. Finally, the numerous references to history and ideologies of the 20th century further anchor the drawings in a painful and deadly reality.