A Facebook group has offered the world a glimpse of what the creative arm of humanity can accomplish when indoors for a really long stretch of time.
The answer? Artistic masterpieces, but in real-life.
The Изоизоляция (Izoizolyacia) Facebook group, which translates to "art isolation", invites its members to take a masterpiece and recreate it, post it side-by-side with the real thing, and then upload it for its half a million members to judge.
What began as a competition run by well-known Russian cartoonist and artist Vasya Lozhkin has quickly amassed a cult following, with hundreds of thousands of plucky members taking part.
The result, as you can imagine, is the kind of thing social media scrolling dreams are made of: pure, unabashed joy.
Works by masters including Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo are given a modern reworking here, using everything from real-life models to kitchen scraps.
Naturally, Johannes Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' has been recreated several times, by women and men of all ages, while there are also several attempts at abstracts – Picasso quickly becoming a hot favourite.
A Mihaly Zichy masterpiece has been remade with sweet wrappers, onion shavings, paper clips and more. Animals feature rather a lot, too. A dog recreating Vincent van Gogh's 'Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear'? You bet it's been done.
The group was created less than two weeks ago, on March 30, 2020, but already has 417,428 members.
In its description, the founder of the page, Lozhkin, a well-known Russian artist who is famous for his cartoons, issued a public challenge: for people to recreate famous artworks.
Ten of the best would win a prize consisting of merchandise from his own brand: t-shirts, books and prints of his paintings. The winner will be chosen on April 20, though it seems Lozhkin will have his work cut out for him.
In the last 24 hours the page has welcomed 1,673 new posts. Since its inception, more then 10,000 posts have compared modern masterpieces to everyday life.
Here are a few of our favourites:
1. Filipp Malyavin's 'Laughing Girl'
2. Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring', with someone's child
3. Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring', with someone's pet
4. An ingenious take on a Picasso
5. A very 2020 riff on Yuriy Pimenov's 'New Moscow'
6. Mihaly Zichy's 19th century painting of the Ballroom in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, but with food scraps
7. Inge Leek's beloved cartoons recreated with a quarantine buddy
8. The Great Wave in Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai, remade in a washing machine
9. Van Gogh's 'Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear'
10. A 2002 piece entitled Dandelions by Andrey Cikacev
11. Rose Freymuth Frazier's Cornucopia
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Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
Fixtures
Friday Leganes v Alaves, 10.15pm; Valencia v Las Palmas, 12.15am
Saturday Celta Vigo v Real Sociedad, 8.15pm; Girona v Atletico Madrid, 10.15pm; Sevilla v Espanyol, 12.15am
Sunday Athletic Bilbao v Getafe, 8.15am; Barcelona v Real Betis, 10.15pm; Deportivo v Real Madrid, 12.15am
Monday Levante v Villarreal, 10.15pm; Malaga v Eibar, midnight
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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