Roman Abramovich's girlfriend Dasha Zhukova apologises caught in racism row

The image with Dasha Zhukova, Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend on the ‘black woman’ chair before it was cropped .

An image featuring Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend sitting on a chair made to look like a half-naked black woman was surfacing on a Russian website called Buro 24/7.

The chair looks like a lifelike mannequin of a black woman, and what made the situation worse was that the picture was posted on the day while America was celebrating their national holiday to remember civil rights leader Dr King on Monday.

“The slave chair is the perfect metaphor for how black women are treated by the fashion industry,” Musa Okwonga of BBC wrote.

Zhukhova, however deleted the image from her instagram and released an apology stating: “This photograph, which has been published completely out of context, is of an art work intended specifically as a commentary on gender and racial politics. I utterly abhor racism, and would like to apologise to anyone who has been offended by this image.”

Buro, on the other hand, replaced the image with a cropped version of the original image where only the legs were visible.

The cropped out image.

“Buro 24/7 is categorically opposed to the idea of racism, oppression or humiliation of people in any form,” said a Buro 24/7 representative “We see this chair purely in an artistic context. We apologise to all our readers who were offended by these photographs.”

Zhukova and Abramovich have two children Aaron Alexander, four and 10-month-old Leah Lou.