In 1992 I was a student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. At that time the name of the “painting department” was changed into “Autonomous” — basically the students could make anything, as long as they could well defend their position. It was the time of computer and video work, installations and all things “conceptual”, and it was often communicated that painting is a kind of outdated.
Raised in East Germany, in Berlin and Dresden, I came from the more expressionist tradition and I had my difficulties with the general spirit at the Rietveld Academie at that time. On the other side I learned a lot of the conceptual approach and my art got better focused.
One lonely night in my studio in the Cornelis Drebbelstraat I painted this figure in a few minutes — the Ukrainian Paratrooper, approximately 200×150 cm on canvas.
Why is the Ukrainian Paratrooper in yellow?
In that time I was deeply worried about the war in Abkhazia — a beautiful narrow mountain patch at the Black Sea coast, that had declared a disputed independence from Georgia. Georgia and most countries did not acknowledge its independence. A huge war started.
Dutch newspapers at the time covered the conflict with gruesome stories and pictures. I couldn’t fully grasp the suffering of the people and the causes and sense of this civil war.
Young independent Ukraine then had UN Peace Corps soldiers — if I remember correctly — and offered their best fighters to hotspot conflicts on our globe, those conflicts so hot that other countries wouldn’t send their own troops. But I think they were not involved in the Abkhazia conflict.
Yellow is the color of hope and the sun. I wished peace for the many resulting conflicts and riots after the break-up of the Soviet Union.
So first it was just “The UN-Paratrooper” and emerged into “The Ukrainian UN-Paratrooper.”
He’s a healthy, sturdy village guy, bursting from the sky, full of youthful strength and optimistic energy, dropping into an unknown conflict — maybe in Africa — and will soon stand between the crossfires. But he will survive. He’s unstoppable.
Maybe art can indeed change reality and have an impact on our world?
A few years earlier I was myself a young, inexperienced soldier in the late GDR in East Germany. Taking photos was strongly forbidden, but still I managed to snatch a few. I couldn’t know the horrors of a real war, but I imagine it to this day often.
The period of 1991–1993 at the Rietveld Academie was one of the best in retrospect in my work. It came directly from my heart and my soul.
Imagine how my life turned — when I actually married my Georgian wife just eight years later and have lived since then in Georgia, with the still unsettled conflict.
Update — March 2026
Thirty-four years after painting the Ukrainian Paratrooper in Amsterdam, I am still in Tbilisi — and the conflicts I worried about in 1992 are still unresolved. Abkhazia remains frozen. The war in Ukraine, which I somehow anticipated in yellow paint that lonely night in the Cornelis Drebbelstraat, is very much alive.
I have been known online for many years as “Hans”. In 2026 I finally unified everything under my real name: Heiner Buhr. One artist, one presence, one name.
This spring I am publishing my first major painting catalog — 28 years of work in Georgia since 1997. The Ukrainian Paratrooper, still in Berlin, will not be in it. The large canvases from Amsterdam and Berlin have not yet made the journey to Tbilisi. But they are waiting.
The Ukrainian Paratrooper watches all of this from a wall in Berlin. Yellow. Unstoppable.
Heiner Buhr — Painter & Crypto Artist, Tbilisi
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