Zurab Tsereteli, a controversial Georgian sculptor famed for a bronze statue of Vladimir Putin dressed in a judo outfit, has been sacked as advisor to Moscow's city government.
The 78-year-old was among a dozen other aides fired by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin on Monday. The artist's office was not available for comment.
Architecture activist Konstantin Mikhailov said Tsereteli's departure had been "a long time coming" and the "logical continuation of the reshuffle at the mayor's office." For more than a year now, Sobyanin has been sacking batches of officials almost every day.
Tsereteli, the favorite artist of former mayor Yury Luzhkov, has been denounced by critics as pompous and tasteless. Activists have run an online "Stop Tsereteli" campaign and at one point attempted to blow up his giant statue of Peter the Great along the Moscow River.
The Virtual Tourist website has voted the 98-meter monument, depicting the tsar in a somewhat surreal Roman getup atop a greenish frigate, the 10th worst public monument.
There was even talk of carting it off when President Dmitry Medvedev sacked Luzhkov, who had been in office since 1992, because he had lost his "trust."
Tsereteli's other confections include a bronze pillar celebrating 200 years of friendship between the Russian and Georgian peoples, more commonly known as the "kebab," and a glass-and-bronze shopping mall outside the Kremlin featuring fairy tale characters capering about in fountains, dubbed "the jacuzzi" and often used as a public convenience.
The Georgian artist will no longer be making anything of the kind, at least not in Moscow, Mikhailov told RIA Novosti.
But Tsereteli, the President of the Russian Academy of Arts, seems undaunted and in 2010 vowed to make a monument higher than the Eiffel Tower.
