Pink Flamingo
A.S.S Project - Krasnodar, Russia
September 2026
A.S.S.project is proud to present Pink Flamingo, a solo exhibition by British artist Michael Pybus. The title, an ode to John Waters’ 1972 cult masterpiece Pink Flamingos. A film that revels in deliberate bad taste, grotesque glamour and joyous transgression.
Pybus, like Waters, finds liberation in the lowbrow, the discarded and the proudly artificial. Where Waters gave us Divine devouring dog shit as a middle finger to bourgeois propriety, Pybus gives us supermarket packaging, electrical cords, children’s toys and art-historical jokes transformed into three-dimensional altars of contemporary absurdity.
The works on show are resolutely mixed-media assemblages that sit somewhere between painting, sculpture and devotional object. They are proudly “wrong”. Deliberately over-decorated, wired, stuffed, braided and plugged in.
In Suprematist Composition White on White 2026, a Malevich homage is interrupted by a contorted gymnast print and a black electrical plug whose cord snakes down the wall to be chewed by a bright blue plush dolphin wearing a pink tutu. High modernism is literally brought down to earth and plugged into the socket of everyday kitsch. The sacred geometry of the Russian avant-garde meets the cheap thrill of consumer spectacle.
This tension between reverence and ridicule runs throughout the exhibition. Black Square 2026 offers a degraded, almost necrotic version of Malevich’s iconic work, replacing the infamous painted black square with the damaged backside of a found Polaroid. Both a celebration and autopsy of the supreme statement of non-objectivity.
Other works lean harder into the grotesque-pop vernacular. Polyester 2026 features collaged images of a grinning actor, M&M characters, and a close-up of teeth being brushed with cartoonish violence. A plush snake and a braided noose ending in a smiling teddy bear complete the composition. Part vanity mirror, part lynching, part children’s birthday party gone horribly wrong. The title Polyester signals the synthetic, shiny, deeply unfashionable fabric of our shared cultural unconscious and also a nod to Waters’ infamous 1981 film, Polyester which was a dark satire on domesticity and suburban life.
Reboot 2026 incorporates Mars chocolate bar wrappers, a phone charger, electric socket and a thick tangled ball of multicoloured yarn that resembles both a brain and a parasitic cocoon. The work feels like a portrait of the contemporary subject: overstimulated, constantly charging, wrapped in branding and slowly unravelling.
GEORGE Jacki 2026 presents a shiny foil crucifix made of LED light pucks and candy wrappers, with a grinning yellow sun car air freshener at its centre and the handwritten name “George White” on the back of a found polaroid. The piece radiates a kind of manic domestic spirituality. Craft-shop shamanism for the era of Shien and Temu.
In Remote Control 2026 the central declaration “GETTING ATTENTION IS NOT EASY” is spelled out in thick painted letters above a film still image cut from a Twilight movie companion book. Palm tree trim, glitter, tangled yarns and a DVD remote control complete the tableau. The work is painfully honest about the artist’s (and our) condition: desperate to be seen in a world of infinite distraction, using whatever shiny, loud, or pathetic materials are closest to hand.
General Surroundings perhaps best encapsulates the exhibition’s spirit. Goggly eyes multiply across an orange splat, Galaxy chocolate wrappers form the base, artificial flowers burst forth and a green polka-dot elephant looks on. The frame is encrusted with plastic jewels. It is an excessive, tender, ridiculous yet strangely moving love letter to the detritus of late capitalism.
Pybus’s practice refuses the false dignity of “elevated” materials. Instead, he works with the stuff that actually surrounds us: packaging, plugs, plush toys, celebrity imagery, discount craft supplies. His objects are wired, literally and figuratively. They have plugs, cords, and switches. They want to be turned on. They want your attention even as they mock the very idea of it.
This is not ironic art in the detached, cool sense. It is fervent, messy, and deeply felt. Pybus embraces the John Waters ethos that good taste is the enemy of joy and that there is just as much truth to be found in a glitter-encrusted Mars bar wrapper as there is in minimalist masterpieces.
Pink Flamingo is an exhibition that walks the tightrope between celebration and despair, sincerity and sarcasm, beauty and ugliness, often landing squarely on all of them at once.
In an age of algorithmic curation and sterile digital perfection, Pybus offers something stubbornly physical, tactile and unapologetically grotesque. These works smell like glue and chocolate wrappers. They hum with electricity. They are ridiculous, they know it and they dare you not to love them anyway.
A.S.S.project (Artist's Studio Shows) was founded by artist Vanya Venmer in 2025. A nomadic exhibition project currently based in Krasnodar, Russia that explores and develops experimental approaches to promoting emerging contemporary art through exhibitions held in artists’ workshops, studios and other spaces not originally intended for exhibition making but used as places of artistic production.
(Photo Credit Vanya Venmer www.vanyavenmer.net )