On his first day on the job, a security guard drew two pairs of eyes with a ballpoint pen onto artist Anna Leporskaya’s ‘Three Figures’ painting during an abstract art exhibition in Yekaterinburg, western Russia.
The painting, which is insured for $1MILLION, was damaged by the security guard after he is said to have became bored on his first day.
The damage and cost of restoration has been estimated at $3,360.
The gallery said: ‘We inform you that during the investigation, the person who painted the eyes on the figures in the painting by Anna Leporskaya was identified – this is an employee of a private security organization that carries out security activities of the Yeltsin Center’.
‘Recall that on December 7 2021, during the demonstration of the exhibition ‘The World as Non-Objectiveness. The Birth of a New Art’ in the Art Gallery of the Yeltsin Center suffered a painting by Anna Leporskaya ‘Three Figures’ from the collection of the State Tretyakov Gallery’.
The gallery added: ‘The damage was done with a ballpoint pen’.
It was two eagle-eyed exhibition visitors who spotted the added-on eyes to two of the three faceless figures on the 1930s painting.
The security guard who drew eyes on the painting, said to be 60 years old, has since been fired.
