On a recent trip to Kyiv, I found myself standing before a pop art rendering of Gerard David’s celebrated 15th-century diptych, The Judgement of Cambyses. In two panels, the painting depicts the arrest and flaying of the corrupt judge Sisamnes, who accepted a bribe and delivered an unfair verdict. The renaissance painting had been updated for the 21st century—before me, Sisamnes and the authorities executing his punishment appeared in an array of fluorescent colors, their bright, strained faces contrasting wildly with the clean, modern lines of the Kiev law firm that had commissioned it. “We ordered this painting in a pop art style to show that this problem is very modern,” Artem Afian, an attorney at Juscutum, told me.
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A activist from the Movement of New Forces political organization dressed in a President Petro Poroshenko mask and costume holds a banner reading "I'll sell the country for a lot" during an anti-corruption event near the President Administration building in Kyiv on April 25.
