Marilyn Crying Diptych, acrylic paint, enamel and diamond dust on linen, 2011, courtesy of the artist

RUSSELL YOUNG

The Goss-Michael Foundation will premiere a new exhibition by prominent artist and photographer Russell Young. The exhibition will open to the public on March 7, 2012 and continue through April 1, 2012.

The Goss-Michael Foundation, a nonprofit organization, exists to educate, engage and inspire audiences by presenting exhibitions of British Contemporary art, provide vast resources, educational programs and scholarships to aspiring artists.

Earlier exhibitions have featured Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Sarah Lucas, Marc Quinn, Nigel Cooke and Michael Craig-Martin.

It was 20 years ago that British photographer Russell Young first lent his eye to celebrity culture. The assignment was photographing George Michael for the sleeve of an album called “Faith”. That job launched a career and soon Young was shooting musicians like Morrissey, Bjork, Springsteen, Dylan, REM, New Order, The Smiths, Diana Ross, Paul Newman and many other celebrities. The next natural step was directing music videos; Russell directed a hundred music videos during the heyday of MTV.

Ten years into his career, Young started painting, but his work remained private. Until 2003, when Young showed his first series – and first sold out show of paintings – called Pig Portraits, about the glamour in the dark side of crime, fame, sex, drugs, rock and roll.  On the heels of the first series came Fame + Shame, a visual celebration of the inevitable fallout of resulting chaos that comes from the three decades of cultural excess. Dirty Pretty Things one of the first diamond dust prints reflects Young’s love for light after growing up in the leaden skies of Northern England. One of the most famous images is his Marilyn Monroe in “Living Well is the Best Revenge.”

In 2010, Young endured an eight-day coma, pneumonia and ARDS: all induced by the H1N1 flu virus. He emerged from his near-death experience with severe memory loss and an incredibly weak body. During his long recovery he began to examine his life and his surroundings in a whole new way. Young left the hospital and had to learn to breath, write, draw, think and walk for the second time in his life. So enough, Young came again to paint. This time, freed from the domestication of the ‘picture world,’ as a feral boy, filled with a new, rough energy of violence, sex and power. With the Helter Skelter  series, Young learned to dance with this energy, crossing into the subconscious.

The GMF is proud to present this exhibition which will highlight Young’s most famous works including the above mentioned.

“My work is sort of soundtrack to my life, loves, experiences and influences. My method of working is to search, destroy and create. The images of this series have been collected from newspaper cuttings, e-bay, long correspondence with police departments throughout the world or even given by celebrities themselves. The idea to create “anti-celebrity” portraits was probably a reaction to my former career. However, they turned out to be even more beautiful and iconic. There is undeniably this attitude that is very real, in your face, a beauty that is hard to ignore. My art is a sort of soundtrack to my life, loves, experiences and influences. These would be my heroes that are missing from Art History.”

Russell Young has risen to become one of the most collected and sought after artists of our time. Celebrities and the most discriminating collectors like Abby Rosen, the Getty’s, Elizabeth Taylor, David Hockney, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, David Bowie and President Barack Obama have added Russell’s works to their collections. His larger than life screenprint images from history and popular culture are compelling, daunting, and undeniable.

Russell is married to actress and presenter Finola Hughes, they have three young children Dylan, Cash and Sadie, Russell lives and works in New York and California.

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The Goss-Michael Foundation was founded by George Michael and Kenny Goss in June 2007. The Foundation offers the public a rotating schedule of exhibitions derived from Goss and Michael’s private collection of British contemporary art as well as other institutions. These exhibitions serve as a challenge to preconceived art notions and strive to set a new standard in artistic awareness by providing visitors with fresh and fascinating art experiences. Through these experiences, the Foundation hopes to generate new perspectives and conversations on the creative methods of contemporary artists. Locally, the Foundation is dedicated to contributing to Dallas’ thriving artistic community and enhancing the public’s familiarity and interaction with contemporary and emerging British artists. The Foundation fosters young artists in Dallas, and throughout Texas through numerous scholarships and art education programs.

The Goss-Michael Foundation Hours: Tuesday-Friday 10:00am-6:00pm, Saturday 11:00am-4:00pm, Monday by appointment only. There is no charge to visit the Foundation.

NIGEL COOKE

The Goss-Michael Foundation is pleased to present a solo show by the prominent British artist Nigel Cooke. The exhibition will open to the public on Friday, October 21, 2011 and continue through Saturday, February 18, 2012

The show consists mainly of works that belong to the Goss-Michael collection and local collectors.  The exhibition has been created in close collaboration with the artist and, is in fact, one of the most comprehensive shows of Nigel Cooke’s work, covering all series of his work up to the present.

The Goss-Michael Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing a forum for contemporary art and with a focus on British Art by presenting exhibitions and programs, aim to educate, engage and inspire young and adult audiences in Texas, the United States and around the world. Earlier exhibitions have featured Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Sarah Lucas, Marc Quinn, Michael Craig-Martin and Jim Lambie.

Nigel Cooke’s paintings construct a dark and melancholic world.  At its core, Cooke’s work is an allegorical conception of creativity and production as ambivalent human traits, played out in a deeply psychologized landscape populated by disaffected artists, philosophers, and a host of anthropomorphized and dejected foodstuffs.

This band of cultural vagrants are martyrs to the existential melodrama of abstract thought, haunting  a tired, post industrial frontier where nature and creative endeavor collide in an illusionistic melting pot that is both

landscape and mindscape. These irresponsible characters abandon reason in this place, gleefully and foolishly throwing themselves headlong into the unseen and unknown, producing actions and artifacts that reflect and satirize their hubris and self-absorption.

Throughout all Cooke’s work, this sort of foolish characterization embodies a ridiculing of the vanities of artistic production, while at the same time celebrating its creative capacity for intellectual renewal, visionary thought and self-criticism.

Yet with all the sense of uncertainty and incapacity that Cooke describes in his paintings, their coming to be is the result of his own tireless grappling with the material and conceptual dimensions of painting. Cooke demonstrates a technical faculty and deftness of painterly touch that is at complete odds with the pathetic, hackneyed paintings, books and sculptures created by the subjects and characters, which appear in various guises within the paintings themselves.

Cooke’s restless intellect has always fed continuous progression, and this exhibition presents an opportunity to survey key points in the developmental phases of Cooke’s image making, conceptual structures, and narrative world.

Nigel Cooke was born in Manchester in 1973 and lives and works in London. Cooke was awarded a PhD in Fine Art from Goldsmith’s College, London, in 2004, and MA Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1997. Nigel Cooke has been the subject of solo museum shows at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007), The Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth (2006), Art Now, Tate Britain (2004), and South London Gallery, London (2006). Paintings by Nigel Cooke are held amongst the most esteemed international collections, including Tate, London; British Council, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. A monograph featuring an essay by Michael Bracewell and an interview between the artist and Martin Herbert was published by König Books, London, in late 2010.