Russian artist Andrei Tarusov has released his latest pin-up calendar, this one dedicated to the Bolshevik Revolution’s centennial. In this calendar, Tarusov matches erotically illustrated women with real slogans from famous Soviet propaganda posters.
The artist is funding the calendar using the website Boomstarter, where he’s already more than halfway to his goal of 120,000 rubles (about $2,000), after less than two days.
“Like always, I couldn’t settle on a theme for the calendar for a long time, but then it dawned on me that there will be the 100-year anniversary of the 1917 revolution. And this is still a significant event that influenced the whole world — including the art world,” Tarusov wrote online.
In an effort to avoid accusations of extremism, or perhaps just to make clear that he’s no Communist, Tarusov specifies that the calendar is not meant as an incitement to revolution; it’s merely “an erotic-humoristic art work.”
This isn’t Tarusov’s first Boomstarter campaign. His two previous efforts — a 2014 pin-up calendar dedicated to the Sochi Winter Olympics and a 2015 pin-up calendar dedicated to Crimea — netted more than 2 million rubles (more than $33,000).
The Western media has noticed Tarusov’s work before. In June 2015, CNET drew attention to his pin-up drawings of women in the HBO series “Game of Thrones.” A few months later, Daily Mail reported on Tarusov’s racy illustrations of popular Disney princesses.
Today, Tarusov lives in Los Angeles. In September 2016, he launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund production of “The Red Pin-Up Book,” a collection of his work. He set out to gather just $6,000, and so far he’s raised more than $51,000.
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