Children of the revolution

2026, Oil on Italian Linen, 101.6 x 101.6cm

This work brings together competing systems of value. The history of porcelain is bound to rarity, skilled labour and elite possession, while Soviet ideology sought to relocate value in collective purpose and the rejection of bourgeois privilege. Their meeting produces an immediate contradiction: revolutionary doctrine embodied in the kind of luxury object it opposed.

The contradiction runs both ways. A symbol of political force and ideological certainty is made fragile, while a material associated with status is made to carry the language of collective labour. Neither position remains intact. Within the broader series, a third system enters the equation. The legacy of Cattelan’s taped banana proposes that value can arise through artistic designation alone, independent of rarity or craft. These different models of worth are brought into uneasy alignment, each carrying its own contradictory claim.

Which system is legitimate is unresolved. Instead, the work considers how readily value moves between material, ideology and artistic context.

What appears fixed, whether political doctrine or cultural prestige, remains vulnerable to changes in who holds the authority to define it. In their meeting point, the work reflects on an art economy where value can be meticulously made, instantly manufactured, or dismantled with equal ease.