fig. 162. Valeri Bykovski.

1. He orbited the Earth 81 times with the Vostok 5.

It is a series of paintings and drawings focused on the spatial historical portrait, where I address the ideological theme, specifically the space competition developed between the United States and the former Soviet Union, in the midst of the cold war. They are images of cosmonauts and astronauts whose facial anatomy I distorted and transformed into monsters. The portraits of these space pioneers represented to the world the ideals of their nation. These characters were news in the media and drew a lot of attention from those who followed all this propaganda machinery, which did nothing but divide the world into factions and create tensions. Millions of people remained expectant, almost no one was oblivious to this space phenomenon. The two superpowers rivaled each other in areas of science and technology, but without ever losing sight of the ideological-propagandistic component.