Belarusian artist Alexander Rodin (*1947 in Baranovichi) divides his time between Minsk and Berlin, and thus acts as a mediator between contemporary eastern and western European art and culture. His monumental paintings are a blend of very diverse styles and imagery: old German altar painting, Baroque allegories, surreal dreamscapes, the pathos of Russian Revolutionary painting, and the aesthetics of science fiction. Rodin began with paintings that were critical of the system in the former Soviet Union. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, there came ambitious, highly detailed paintings, and in the past decade he has created works critical of culture and civilization at the threshold between East and West.

This publication provides access to Rodin's unbelievably sensuous, detailed, and thematically controversial paintings, and undertakes to explain his astonishing pictorial compositions.