Mr. Brainwash – Diamond Girl – Marilyn Monroe (Silver)

Description

Mr. Brainwash, Diamond Girl – Marilyn Monroe (Silver) is a silkscreen with diamond dust on paper. From the limited edition of 90.  This print is signed and numbered with Mr. Brainwash’s thumbprint and date on verso.

Marilyn’s beaded Jean Louis gown, worn when she sang Happy Birthday to President Kennedy, was sold in 1999 for £820,000. At the time it was the record price for a single item of clothing, until Marilyn’s billowing white Seven Year Itch dress was put up for sale by Debbie Reynolds in 2011, where it made £2.8 million.

Marilyn’s intervention got Ella Fitzgerald her first major engagement at a Los Angeles nightclub. In 1955 the colour bar was still in force, but Marilyn convinced the management to let Fitzgerald play by promising to sit in the front row for a week. Marilyn had a fixation on Clark Gable, her co-star in The Misfits; as a young girl, Marilyn dreamed that he was her father. When he died, she said that she cried for two days.  She preferred to go naked. Among female studio employees – wardrobe mistresses, hairdressers, make-up artists – she often went without clothes. She gave interviews in the nude and often went out wearing nothing under the black mink that Joe DiMaggio had given her.

Mr. Brainwash, Diamond Girl – Marilyn Monroe (Silver)

A provocative figure in the world of street art, Mr. Brainwash practices an irreverent brand of appropriation characterized by the use of copyrighted images from history, popular culture, and art history. The artist subtly alters the picture or its context, mischievously undermining the tone of the source material. Brainwash, a pseudonym for Thierry Guetta, is known for producing massive spectacles to display his art. He came to prominence through mounting large-scale public projects in his current home of Los Angeles and as the main figure in the Banksy-directed film Exit Through the Gift Shop. His work hinges on the idea that anything is possible in his practice. “Art has no walls. Anybody can be an artist,” he says. “Art has no rules. There’s no manual.”