Pepieta

Buridanova built Pepieta from a specific contradiction: the formal vocabulary of Western European lamentation painting applied to a figure whose suffering is chronic exhaustion rather than grief. The Pieta is the image of someone holding what they have lost. Pepieta is the image of someone who cannot put it down. The cult of Pepe the Merciful is her invention, but it is grounded in something real: the way internet culture has developed its own iconography of burnout, service, and spent devotion. She takes that seriously enough to paint it in oil on linen, set in a 19th-century oak frame. The materials make the claim that this subject deserves the treatment. Buridanova is the BMAG Artist in Residence. Pepieta is the work in which her two worlds — classical painting technique and the mythology of the internet — are most completely the same thing.

Created in 2026, the piece is executed in oil on gallery-wrapped linen canvas, set in a frame made of 19th-century oak, and ready to hang. - Painting: 52 × 61 cm / 20.5 × 24.0 in - With frame: 60.5 × 69.5 cm / 23.8 × 27.4 in Ships from Las Vegas, Nevada.