Before she co-founded an international art magazine, Danijela Krha Purssey was a devoted member of DeviantArt. The online platform, which at its peak hosted over twenty million artists sharing work, was where she first began curating — creating a group page to share her favourite artists and building an audience over several years. It was a hobby, nothing more. But the audience kept growing, and Krha Purssey kept noticing the same thing: technically extraordinary painters, sculptors, and digital artists whose work was ignored by the contemporary art establishment because it did not fit the conceptual frameworks that galleries and institutions preferred. In 2013, she and her husband Richard Purssey — an ICT director who had previously served as CIO at the Art Gallery of New South Wales — turned that frustration into a magazine.
Beautiful Bizarre launched as a platform for what the art world often dismisses: surrealism, pop surrealism, hyperrealism, lowbrow, illustration, and the kind of technically virtuosic figurative work that traditional institutions have historically overlooked. The magazine argued, from its first issue, that these genres were not relics of a pre-conceptual past but the most vital art being made in the present. The argument found an audience. Over the following decade, Krha Purssey published more than thirty-five issues, over 2,500 web articles, and curated exhibitions in four countries. In late 2016, she was awarded the AMP Foundation's Tomorrow Makers Award and grant funding to expand the publication.
The community that has grown around the magazine is as remarkable as the publication itself. Beautiful Bizarre functions as both a magazine and a meeting point for a global network of artists, collectors, and enthusiasts. The annual Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize — a non-acquisitive international competition now in its sixth year, offering over $57,000 in cash and prizes — has become a significant platform for representational artists working across all static mediums and styles, from realism to pop surrealism. Jury panels have included gallery directors from Modern Eden Gallery and Haven Gallery alongside established artists, reinforcing the prize's credibility within a scene that rarely receives institutional recognition.
In perhaps the most improbable chapter of the story, twenty back issues of Beautiful Bizarre were selected for inclusion in the Lunar Codex — a project that sends archives of contemporary art, books, music, and film to the moon aboard NASA Artemis partner missions. The magazine that began as one woman's DeviantArt group will, quite literally, outlast everyone who made it. Krha Purssey, who now runs the operation from Armidale in regional New South Wales — a move from Sydney that friends initially questioned — has said the Lunar Codex inclusion remains the most incredible high of her career. It is hard to argue with her.
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