Pussy Riot

PUSSY RIOT Acrylic & Chalk Pastel on Wood Panel | 30" × 30" | 2025

Pretty. Grotesque. Both at once. That's the whole point.

Pussy Riot is a painting that knows exactly what it's doing and refuses to apologise for any of it. A homage to the Russian punk feminist collective who wore balaclavas and lipstick and performed in churches and went to prison and kept going — this work takes their central aesthetic tension and runs with it completely. Pretty and horror. Dolls and darkness. Good girls who went somewhere considerably more interesting than good.

Three figures inhabit the deep black ground — a green-skinned doll face with red lips that smiles the smile of something that was made to be sweet and decided to be something else entirely, a masked figure whose eyes and mouth emerge from the balaclava with the particular intensity of someone who has chosen anonymity as a form of power rather than concealment, and a third presence at the upper right, hair falling, expression unreadable. Between them a rose blooms in deep pink and burgundy — beautiful, slightly decomposing, exactly right. Pink stars scatter across the surface with the cheerful anarchic energy of someone decorating a revolution.

Words drift across the black ground in chalk — doll, masked, not — fragments of a conversation about identity and performance and the radical act of deciding for yourself which one you are today.

The chalk pastel marks bring a softness to the surface that the subject refuses to have. The wood panel ground gives the black a depth that is genuinely velvety. The pink stars are completely unapologetic.

Pussy Riot. Pretty and grotesque. Nice dolls. Bit horror. Completely, defiantly itself.

📦 Shipping & Details

• 30" × 30" original acrylic and chalk pastel on wood panel
• Signed and dated 2025
• Ships carefully packaged — ready to hang
• Certificate of authenticity included

One original. No reproductions. Pretty and grotesque. Both at once.