What do Lenin, Verka Serduchka and Sharon Stone have in common?
that art imitates life at the city’s wax museum. True, it is a pallid and pasty version of life, but it is art nonetheless. Known more for its circus side‑show allure than high art, the techniques of this ancient craft have been traced back 5,000 years to a time when wax was used to construct masks for royalty and other dignitaries in early Egypt.
Loyal to both customs, this modern display recreates the likenesses of famous personalities and travels around the country to exhibit them. Frozen in motion with their faces trapped in time, the famed figures of the past and present stare out at their visitors with specially crafted glass eyes and waxy complexions.
The collection doesn’t discriminate and celebrities from different countries and all walks of life are fair game, as its owners aim to keep the exhibit appealing for both adults and children. There are historical figures, politicians, singers, actors and sports heroes.
Owned by the father‑and‑son team of Yevhen and Oleksy Sazhyn, the private collection of 43 sculptures doesn’t have a permanent home and moves around Kyiv, renting space from the city’s other museums in addition to traveling to other large cities, such as Donetsk, Mariupol and Odessa. Each summer at least 18 figures from the collection go on the road for six months to Crimea and Odessa, where there are plenty of tourists and curiosity‑seekers passing through who might stop by to have a look at the statues.
Once you enter the exhibit you’ll see President Leonid Kuchma, who looks like he is getting ready to shake your hand, Mikhail Gorbachev frozen in mid‑speech and Soviet leaders Stalin and Lenin, who both look shorter than you would probably expect. The sculptures are all based on the actual dimensions of their real‑life counterparts and some are even wearing their clothes. Ageless Russian singer Valery Leontiv donated the costume from his first concert for his figure while the clothes on Verka Serduchka, Ukraine’s most famous cross‑dresser, came from his own closet. If you catch them at the right angle, some of the statues do look almost real – others just look like macabre caricatures of their intended individuals.
Serduchka, for example, may be well‑dressed, but he looks out of proportion as he arranges his enormous breasts while perched atop a pair of inhumanly skinny legs. Another figure, of a jovial wide open‑mouthed Cossack grabbing his belly, can only be described as disconcerting.
With no wax exhibitions in Ukraine, and the state unable to afford one, the Sazhyns took on creating one in the early 1990s in what for them was a unique endeavor.
Teams of five to 15 specialists – sculptors, artists, cosmetologists and costume designers – work on each of the statues, which have a shelf‑life of about 20 years, provided they are attended to and repaired regularly. Each figure takes between three and seven months to create and costs between $2,500 and $2,800. The hair alone takes up to three weeks to complete and each strand is inserted individually into a wax scalp.
The figure of Sharon Stone, caught just as she is about to uncross her legs from the infamous “Basic Instinct” movie scene, took more than the average time to design: eight months. That, say the Sazhyns, was because women are more complicated than men to design in general – and capturing her legs in just the right position was tricky business.
The collection is currently on display downtown right near the entrance to the Teatralna metro station, and it might be as close as you’re going get to someone famous without the feeling that their presence is just too overpowering to handle.
WAX FIGURE MUSEUM
11 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho.
Tel. 235‑1315.
Hours 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Tickets: Adults Hr 6, children Hr 3.
Web site: www.wax.com.ua
