Russell Young | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | British-American |
Education | University of Chester, Exeter College of Art and Design |
Known for | Screen Printing, Painting, Conceptual art, Installation art |
Spouse | |
Children | 3 |
Website | www |
Russell Young (born 13 March 1959) is a British-American artist best known for large silkscreen paintings using imagery drawn from recent history and popular culture. Young's artistic output includes painting, screen printing, sculpture, installations and film. [1]
Young studied photography, film and graphic design at the University of Chester and later attended Exeter College of Art and Design. He moved to London and gained recognition photographing the early live club shows in the late 1970s of Bauhaus, R.E.M. and the Smiths, and with editorial work for magazines including BLITZ , which featured on several front covers. During this period he shot portraits of Morrissey, Björk, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, New Order, Diana Ross, and Paul Newman. In 1986, he shot the ‘Faith’ sleeve for George Michael. In the following ten years he directed many music videos, working with artists ranging from the Brand New Heavies to Eartha Kitt. [2]
In September 2000, while living in New York City, he began to concentrate on art and to devote himself to painting. Young's work has been shown nationally and internationally including at Scope/Basel, Switzerland SCOPE Art Show and Art Miami, Florida. He lives and works in New York and California.
During the 1990s, Young gave up photography and directing altogether and started to paint seriously. In 1998 he relocated to New York, rented a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and worked on a series of ‘Combine Paintings’, assemblages of collage, found objects and street graffiti. In 2001, he began the series called 'Pig Portraits'. He had acquired the mugshots of musicians, actors and political figures and he blew them up as bold, colorful, silkscreen, portraits of Sid Vicious, Elvis Presley, Jane Fonda, Malcolm X, Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra and Lee Harvey Oswald. "They were meant to be anti-celebrity portraits. To take a dig at my former career I guess. As a release. But they ended up–I think they look better than they do in some of the sessions." [3] He first showed the Pig Portraits at Don O'Melveny Gallery in Los Angeles in 2003. [4]
After 9/11 Young and his family returned to California. In 2005, he showed his Fame+Shame series with the Art of Elysium at Menotti Gallery in Los Angeles, documenting the fallout from the cultural excess of previous decades.
Young began to use diamond dust in 2007. He called the paintings Dirty Pretty Things, pressing the crystals into the web pigment of the images of his paintings. In 2008 he showed many of these at the Kessler Gallery in Southampton, New York as Diamond Dust. He used this process in his well known series, Marilyn Crying, showed at the Halcyon Gallery in London in 2016. [5] [6]
Young became very ill and almost died in February 2010. He was in a coma for 8 days brought on by pneumonia and ARDS; all induced by the H1N1 virus. Young emerged from his long recovery examining his life and surroundings and began to explore the nature of trauma and its effect on both the individual and cultural psyche. 2011 forced a seminal shift in his work, first in the series Helter Skelter, using the violent image from the 1968 Rolling Stones Altamont Free Concert and the Hells Angels killing of Meredith Hunter, over and over, in a series of abstractions. Helter Skelter was shown at SCOPE Miami in 2014 by Bankrobber London.
The Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas held a retrospective of Young's work in the winter of 2012. He also showed a series of large paintings called Only Anarchists are Pretty in the front gallery. He cut up 1970s photographs of bound women and lay them onto large, "unimaginable orgies of claustrophobic assemblage" and titled from the council estates in the deprived areas of Britain: Thorntree, Nant Peris, the Gorbals. [7] An idea he borrows from Joy Division naming themselves for the sexual slavery rooms of nazi concentration camps, told of in the House of Dolls. [8]
Young began two large series of abstract works in 2011. In the Fight of the Paso del Mar, he threw the dust of metals into wet, black pigment and sprayed them with sea water and rain to allow the metals to rust and turn colors. He named them for his favorite surf breaks along the California coast. In Dreamland, he poured paint on the floor and printed it onto linen, building up atmospheric scapes with the names of atomic bomb tests. He showed his Fight of the Paso del Mar and Dreamland paintings at Bankrobber London in 2013.
In honor of Pelé, Young did a screen print in 2015. [9]
In October 2018, Russell Young Superstar, opened at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, a former coal bunker along the banks of the Huangpu River. It is the most extensive survey of his work to date and introducing his 5-year project West. [10]
Young is an active supporter [11] of The Art Of Elysium, an organization empowering artists and communities of need to join together and emotionally triumph over their circumstances through art. In 2016 Russell Young received the Spirit of Elysium award from Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler in recognition of their charitable enterprises using art as a catalyst for social change. [12]
Marcus Harvey is an English artist and painter, one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).
Bruce Conner was an American artist who worked with assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography.
Jack Pierson is an American photographer and an artist. Pierson is known for his photographs, collages, word sculptures, installations, drawings and artists books. His "Self-Portrait" series was shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His works are held in numerous museum collections.
Campbell's Soup Cans is a work of art produced between November 1961 and June 1962 by the American artist Andy Warhol. It consists of thirty-two canvases, each measuring 20 inches (51 cm) in height × 16 inches (41 cm) in width and each consisting of a painting of a Campbell's Soup can—one of each of the canned soup varieties the company offered at the time. The works were Warhol's hand-painted depictions of printed imagery deriving from commercial products and popular culture and belong to the pop art movement.
Llyn Foulkes is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles.
Daniel Simmons Jr. is a Neo-African abstract expressionist painter, a published author, poet and philanthropist. He is the older brother of hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons and rapper Joseph Simmons.
Robert Klippel AO was an Australian constructivist sculptor and teacher. He is often described in contemporary art literature as Australia's greatest sculptor. Throughout his career he produced some 1,300 pieces of sculpture and approximately 5,000 drawings.
Noel Rockmore was born Noel Montgomery Davis to his mother, Gladys Rockmore Davis, and his father, Floyd Davis, in New York City. Rockmore was an American painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. He claimed to have produced more than 15,000 works of art in his lifetime. He is known for his portraits, his early rise to fame, his Preservation Hall portraits, and for changing his name at the height of the popularity he had developed in New York City and he had a daughter, Emilie Rhys
Julian Ritter was an American painter of Polish-German descent who painted primarily nudes, clowns and portraits.
Robert "Bob" Coronato is an American painter and printmaker. Coronato is best known for his paintings of present-day Western Americana, cowboys, and American Indian life and culture.
Hedy Klineman is a German-born American painter living in New York City. She has been painting for over 40 years and is known for portraits of New York celebrities and colorful works based on Asian Buddha's and deities created with silkscreen on canvas done in a manner influenced by her friend Andy Warhol. Her paintings have been shown at Tibet House US, Patterson Museum of Contemporary Art and The New England Museum of Contemporary Art.
Michael McKenzie is an American artist and writer. His mother a fourth generation Irish/German and his father of recent Scottish immigrants. He began writing, drawing, painting and publishing at a young age, his first publication, at age 5, was Two Cents Plain, a four-page magazine he made using a mimeograph machine at his father's office. A fluke meeting at the 1964 World's Fair with his grandmother introduced him to Philip Johnson, Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana, all three of whom he would later work with.
Head I is a relatively small oil and tempera on hardboard painting by the Irish-born British figurative artist Francis Bacon. Completed in 1948, it is the first in a series of six heads, the remainder of which were painted the following year in preparation for a November 1949 exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in London. Like the others in the series, it shows a screaming figure alone in a room, and focuses on the open mouth. The work shows a skull which has disintegrated on itself and is largely a formless blob of flesh. The entire upper half has disappeared, leaving only the jaw, mouth and teeth and one ear still intact. It is the first of Bacon's paintings to feature gold background railings or bars; later to become a prominent feature of his 1950s work, especially in the papal portraits where they would often appear as enclosing or cages around the figures. It is not known what influences were behind the image; most likely they were multiple – press or war photography, and critic Denis Farr detects the influence of Matthias Grünewald.
Orange Prince(1984) is a painting by American artist Andy Warhol of Prince, the American singer, songwriter, record producer, multi-instrumentalist, actor, and director. The painting is one of twelve silkscreen portraits on canvas of Prince created by Warhol in 1984, based on an original photograph provided to Warhol by Vanity Fair. The photograph was taken by Lynn Goldsmith. These paintings and four additional works on paper are collectively known as the Prince Series. Each painting is unique and can be distinguished by colour.
Robin Barton is a British art dealer dealing primarily with Banksy's. Barton studied photography and graphic design at the Exeter College of Art and Design and this was his first encounter with Russell Young. Moving to London in 1980 he began working as a freelance photographer for music and fashion publications Sounds, NME, Blitz, The Face moving on to working regularly for pioneering Independent Magazine photographing amongst others Alec Guinness, Oliver Reed, Johnny Depp, Lou Reed, Hugh Grant and Sir Peter Hall. Later he worked for other publications Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, Elle, Vogue, Tatler and Blueprint.
Betty Lane was an American artist.
Megan Williams is a contemporary artist who creates wall drawings, three-dimensional drawings, and traditional sculpture.
Harry Shokler (1896–1978) was a 20th-century American artist known for his oil paintings and screen prints. Using a realist approach that produced what one critic called an "exactness of rendition", he made colorful landscapes, cityscapes, and marine scenes as well as some notable portraits. He helped pioneer silkscreen printmaking in the 1930s and wrote an influential guide explaining and demonstrating the method. He gave few solo or small group exhibitions in commercial galleries and showed his work mainly from his own studio and in non-profit venues.
Andy Mouse is a series of silkscreen prints created by American artist Keith Haring in 1986. The character Andy Mouse is a fusion between Disney's Mickey Mouse and Andy Warhol. The series consists of four silkscreen prints on wove paper, released in an edition of 30 per colorway, all signed and dated in pencil by Haring and Warhol.
Rupert Jasen Smith Jr. was an American artist. He worked closely with pop artist Andy Warhol as a silkscreen printer and art director for a decade. His association with Warhol led him to work with other artists such as Paul Jenkins, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg. Smith owned one of New York City's top printmaking studios and also held solo exhibitions of his artwork.