Ballerina Lenochka in Black (2025)

This artwork is a found original soviet-era porcelain figure of Seated Ballerina decorated with oil paint.
It is signed, titled, and dated on the bottom.

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This contemporary sculpture begins its life as a modest Soviet‑era porcelain ballerina—one of the delicate figurines originally sculpted by Ukrainian artist Oksana Zhnykrup. In 2017, Jeff Koons magnified that humble prototype into a 13‑meter inflatable installed before New York’s Rockefeller Center. I, too, was drawn to the power of this icon: its marriage of graceful form and state‑sponsored ornament.

Having collected several of these vintage figures, I set out to transform them into something at once familiar and unsettling. Through hand‑applied pigments, polka‑dot patterning, and a dense, black impasto “costume,” I deliberately pit classical poise against the grotesque. In doing so, I probe the fault lines between beauty and kitsch, between the superficial allure of ornamentation and the darker legacies such objects conceal.

This reimagining does more than deface—it liberates. By layering new textures and colors over the porcelain’s once‑pristine surface, I expose the ideological fantasies baked into every curve of that little dancer. The work asks us to reconsider our inherited definitions of “beautiful” and “ugly,” to acknowledge the wounds of history encoded in decorative art—and ultimately to reclaim these fragments of the past, forging fresh meanings from their broken shine.