RUSSELL Y - Brigitte Bardot Red

 Technique : Silkscreen and diamond powder on canvas

Dimension:  95 x 75 cm 

Edition : Edition 3 on 10 

Information: Russell is best known for compelling, larger-than-life silkscreen paintings appropriated from recent history and popular culture. Alluding to the great Pop artists of the past, he reinvents bold, sometimes brutal imagery while bearing witness to the ambition and glamorous excesses of twenty-first-century America.

With an unstoppable urge to launch his career, Russell moved to London three weeks before his graduate show. This tough time, living rough on the Embankment and in a series of squats, with casual work in record shops and a tailoring business, was formative, developing his ideas about social inequality, popular culture, the music industry, fashion, and materials. The opportunity arose to assist the photographer Christos Raftopoulos, who introduced Young to fresh concepts of intense detail and light. He embarked on projects of his own, taking photographs at the live club shows of Bauhaus, REM, and The Smiths, which led on to magazine commissions and sessions for record companies. In 1986, he shot the sleeve imagery for George Michael's album Faith, which was to sell over 25 million copies. After this Young was launched into the limelight and produced portraits of such musicians as Morrissey, Björk, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan and many sports and political celebrities. He diversified into music videos, directing 100 during the heyday of MTV. In 1992, he moved to Hollywood, where he met and married the actress Finola Hughes.

During the 1990s Russell began looking beyond the limits of the photograph 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 Painting experiments, making assemblages of collage, found objects and street graffiti. His first solo exhibition, in Los Angeles in 2003, was an anti-celebrity series of Pig Portraits. Its uncomfortably large monochrome silkscreens, based on low-grade police booking photographs, record moments when the rich and famous fell foul of the law. However, in turning the tables on his former career they achieve a more penetrating beauty and iconic status. Established as a painter, Russell, and his family moved back to the California coast, where he focused on 'action by reflection', developing ideas. The powerful, eclectic Fame+Shame series followed in 2005, documenting the fallout of cultural excess from the previous three decades - a gritty, Pop Art cocktail of America seen through the eyes of a marginalised immigrant from northern England.

Russell began to use diamond dust in 2007, pressing crystals into paintings he called Dirty Pretty Things. He was drawn to the opulence of the light shimmering off the multi-faceted glass, the famous faces lost in abstract flickers of light only to re-emerge. His American Envy paintings (2009) revisit the country's counterculture but go deeper into a vortex of rebellion, hope, violence, and madness.

In 2010 Russell was struck down by swine flu with severe complications. In a coma for eight days, he was not expected to survive. After a lengthy stay in hospital, he emerged from this near-death experience; during the process of recovery, he explored the effects of trauma on both the individual and the cultural psyche. 2011 saw a seminal shift in his work, embracing a more visceral artistic process Russell produced the magnificent Helter Skelter series.

Russell's artistic output embraces painting, screenprinting, sculpture, installations, and film. Most important to him are the titles, the crops, and the progression from darkness to light, reflecting his transition from painful early years in northern England to warmth, growth and fulfilled potential under the sunny skies of America. As his art evolves, the darks become darker, the lights bigger and brighter.

In January 2016 Russell and Hughes received the Spirit of Elysium award from Dame Vivienne Westwood and Andreas Kronthaler in recognition of their charitable enterprises using art as a catalyst for social change. Russell's work is represented in the collections of the Polk Museum of Art in Florida, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, the Saatchi Collection, Barack Obama, the Qatari royal family, Liz Taylor, Kate Moss, David Bowie, and Brad Pitt. Young has exhibited in museums and galleries in London, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore, New York, Detroit, Miami, and Los Angeles.

Exhibitions of Russell's major series include Pig Portraits (2003), Fame + Shame (2005), Horsepower (2007), Diamond Dust(2008), Dirty Pretty Things (2009), Diamonds are Forever (2010), American Envy (2011), Only Anarchists Are Pretty (2012), Dreamland (2013), The Fight of the Paso del Mar (2013), Helter Skelter (2014), Lost Angels (2014), his debut solo exhibition at Halcyon Gallery, London, Superstar (2016), American Landscapes (2016), Femme Fatale (2017) and NY Grenades (2018).

In late 2018, Superstar, a landmark retrospective of Russell's work, opened at Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, allowing his audience to reflect on the development of a remarkable body of work spanning almost two decades of practice. Russell was the first American contemporary artists to ever be exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, with his work being met with critical acclaim by its Chinese audience as well as the rest of the world with over 15,000 visitors viewing the exhibition in the opening week. 

Due to demand, multiple events where organised by the Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai for Superstar. This included a private guided tour by the artist, a one-off silkscreen printing workshop, and private talks given to students of the prestigious Donghua and Tongji Universities where Young was able to meet and inspire a future generation of Chinese artists.