For a decade and a half, Maxim Trudolyubov was regarded as one of Russia’s most influential editors, responsible for the opinion pages of a leading liberal newspaper. Now, after being labeled a “foreign agent” by the Russian state in 2024, Trudolyubov lives between Vilnius and Vienna and has reinvented himself in exile as the visual artist Max Trutt. His very first solo exhibition opened this weekend at the gallery of an Iranian artist in Vienna’s Neubau district. Having worked as a...

Max Trutt When I began to spend more time on drawing and painting, setting aside for a while analytical and editorial work, I realized that I was not so much changing my occupation as my point of view. I discovered that an artist has no vantage point that allows him to take in the whole landscape at once and see the ant trails along which the observed creatures go out in the morning to find food and return in the evening to their anthill-homes. An artist, or at least the kind of artist I like...

Max Trutt For years I was an editor, the guy who had to call things by their names. I did exactly what the conformist artists from my childhood couldn’t – or wouldn’t – do. Later I started thinking of them as engineers. In a hostile system, engineering was one of the few safe professions: the engineer answers how, not what. You could hide inside the craft. The what was for party officials, chief architects, managers. And it turned out a writer or painter could do the same: hide inside the...