klossart.com presents Bad Beautiful, an exhibition of Ukrainian artist Robert Saller. Conceived in 2009, this striking series examines the paradox of beauty when it appears in the faces of those tied to violence, notoriety, and moral collapse.
Saller confronts viewers with unsettling contrasts: the widely circulated childhood portrait of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) set against his physical decline in later life; Mary Bell and Nevada-tan, two children associated with acts of murder; Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, whose names remain synonymous with destruction. The original cycle also included depictions of Vasyl Kulyk, Bonnie and Clyde, and Gary John Wayne, with several of those works now in private collections.
Executed with rollers, stencils, and acrylic layers, the paintings echo the visual language of printmaking and Pop Art. Their flat surfaces and graphic immediacy recall propaganda, yet here the repetition is stripped of glamour, exposing darker cultural myths where attraction and repulsion meet.
The series takes its title from a line in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
“It would have made a dreadfully ugly child; but it makes rather a handsome pig.”
This ironic remark mirrors the central paradox of Bad Beautiful – beauty found where it should not exist, and ugliness emerging where we expect innocence.
Works in the exhibition are listed at EUR 6,660 each, a provocative gesture reinforcing the conceptual edge of the series. Prices are open to discussion with collectors ready to engage with its difficult, fascinating themes.
Bad Beautiful challenges viewers to reconsider the images we consume: what we glorify when we repeat a face, how innocence is projected onto the infamous, and why beauty so often masks violence.
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