16 January—12 February, 2016
Galerie Christine Brügger, Bern, Switzerland

"With meticulous detail and breathtaking colours, Nabokov creates literary worlds that bring to me the confusion of a Europe in disarray. The Russian past merges with its Western European present to form a harmonious language in which, for me, music and painting unite.

My paintings are not interpretations or interpretations. Sometimes it is an entire story, or a paragraph, sometimes just a word to create images within me. Paintings that I reproduce in different artistic styles and techniques as my inner self perceives them."

—Wolfgang Beltracchi

Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian-American writer. He was born on April 22, 1899, into a St. Petersburg aristocratic family. In 1917, after the October Revolution, his family fled to London and Berlin via Yalta. In Berlin, his father was killed in an assassination attempt. Nabokov studied Russian and French literature at Cambridge. From 1922 to 1936, he published in Berlin under the pseudonym W. Sirin until he started using his own name. In 1936, he fled again, moving to France with his Jewish wife, and in 1940, they relocated to the United States. In 1959, he achieved worldwide fame with his novel "Lolita." He didn't return to Europe until 1961. From 1961 to 1977, he lived at the Palace Hotel in Montreux on Lake Geneva. Vladimir Nabokov passed away on July 2, 1977.