Secondary Market
Russell Young
British, born 1959
Russell Young (born Yorkshire, 1959) is a British-born artist working in the United States whose large silkscreens, often pressed with diamond dust, revisit Hollywood glamour, mugshots and the American Dream. Before turning to art he was a music photographer who shot the cover of George Michael’s Faith.
Biography
Russell Young was born in Yorkshire in 1959 and studied at Chester and at Exeter College of Art and Design. He first made his name behind the camera: in the 1980s he photographed early live shows by Bauhaus, R.E.M. and The Smiths, portraits of Morrissey, Björk, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, and the cover of George Michael’s 1987 album Faith, while directing some hundred music videos. He moved to Hollywood in 1992 and to New York in 1998.
Fame and its shadow
In 2000 Young left the music industry to work full time as an artist. His first series, Pig Portraits, shown in Los Angeles in 2003, turned police booking photographs of the famous — Elvis Presley, Steve McQueen, Jane Fonda, Malcolm X, Sid Vicious — into monumental silkscreens. Glamour and scandal share the same surface in his work: icons are enlarged, flattened and repeated until their image becomes both seductive and unsettling.
Diamond dust
From 2007 Young began pressing diamond dust into his prints, first in the Dirty Pretty Things paintings, giving his Marilyns and Brandos a surface that sparkles and shifts as the viewer moves. Later series include Diamonds Are Forever (2010), Marilyn Crying and Superstar (2016) and Femme Fatale (2017).
Museums
The Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas held a retrospective of his work in 2012. In 2015–2016 the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Florida, presented Forever Young, his first retrospective in an American museum, and holds Marilyn Glamour (2010) in its permanent collection. In 2018 the Modern Art Museum Shanghai devoted Russell Young Superstar to his work.