Pussy Riot

Acrylic and Pastel Écu on Wood Panel | 30×30 inches | 2025 | Divine Feminine

They put their balaclavas on. They put their lipstick on. They walked into the cathedral and they played their song.

They knew what would happen. They went anyway.

Pussy Riot — the painting, like the collective that named it — is about that specific quality of courage that exists at the intersection of fury and joy, that understands the stakes completely and decides, with full information and zero apology, that some things are worth the cost of saying them. The Russian feminist art collective who stormed the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 2012 and performed their punk prayer against Putin — Mother of God, Drive Putin Away — and were arrested, tried, imprisoned, and became in their imprisonment more powerful than any sentence could contain — they are the direct inheritors of every woman on every page of this series. Mary Magdalene. The witches. The mystics. The prophets. Lourdes, looking through the cross with that steady gaze.

Same story. Different century. Neon balaclavas instead of red veils.

The painting is their world — deep black, the colour of midnight operations and secret meetings and the particular darkness that serious troublemaking requires. Pink stars blaze across the surface with the cheerful aggression of graffiti that knows it will be painted over and doesn't care, that exists for the moment of its making rather than its permanence. Two figures emerge from the darkness — one teal-faced, red-lipped, grinning with the particular grin of a woman who has decided that the situation is both completely serious and genuinely funny, which is the most dangerous kind of woman there is. The other, pale and wild-haired, caught mid-becoming, her face still assembling itself from the paint the way a persona assembles itself from necessity and nerve.

A rose blooms in the upper left — because even here, even in this painting about defiance and punk energy and going out and causing necessary havoc, the feminine insists on beauty. Not as decoration. As declaration. The rose that blooms in the dark. The lipstick under the balaclava. The beauty that is not for anyone else and never was.

Words surface from the black like transmissions — doll, riot, nun, unmasked — the vocabulary of a movement that understands that language is a weapon and has always been comfortable using it. Disembodied eyes and lips float through the composition like evidence, like the parts of women that are seen when the rest is deliberately, strategically hidden. The balaclava is not concealment. It is a choice about what to reveal and what to withhold — the eyes that see everything, the mouth that says everything, the identity protected so the message can travel further than the person.

This is what Pussy Riot the painting celebrates — the women who have always known that part of the territory of the divine feminine is potential martyrdom. Who have looked at the history, at Mary Magdalene and the witches and every woman who was punished for knowing things and saying them — and said: yes. I know. And I'm going anyway.

The lipstick is on. The balaclava is on. The pink stars are going up on the wall of the cathedral and the painting and the world.

Fuck it. Let's go.

✦ Original, one-of-a-kind painting ✦ Acrylic and pastel écu on wood panel ✦ 30 × 30 inches ✦ Created 2025 ✦ Part of the Divine Feminine series ✦ Ready to hang ✦ Free worldwide shipping

Lipstick on. Balaclava on. Pink stars up. Let's go.