FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 2024
Listen to the Happys! Russell Young unveils previously unseen abstract paintings in his new solo exhibition
during Frieze Los Angeles
The acclaimed British-American artist presents abstract paintings examining color and cultural eras at The Desmond Tower
Russell Young, HATE 7, 2013, acrylic, oil, blood and shellac on linen (96 x 72 inches)
Los Angeles, CA – British-American artist Russell Young presents his new solo exhibition Listen to the Happys! at The Desmond Tower during Frieze Los Angeles, curated by William Hamilton and produced by Wienholt Projects. The exhibition is on view February 7 – March 10, 2024.
The exhibition’s title Listen to the Happys!, taken from a handmade sign found in Laurel Canyon, is a reference not only to the Bay Area punk rock band The Happys but also the Northern Soul music and dance movement of 1970s Northern England, reflecting Young’s upbringing in Yorkshire during this period as well as his eventual emigration to California. During this period in Northern England, Young was heavily involved in the many emerging music and subculture scenes, often stealing cars or stowing away on trains to dance at clubs like The Haçienda or The Wigan Casino, watching bands like Happy Mondays and New Order reckoning with a post-Joy Division world. These pivotal inflection points in culture would leave a lasting impression on Young’s current artistic practice.
Described as a “voluntary keeper and interpreter of some of the most captivating and subversive images ever recorded,” Young is best known for his silk screen, often diamond-dusted paintings of cultural icons. This body of work being presented represents a previously unexhibited but equally rich aspect of Young’s practice further examining cultural phenomena.
The paintings in this exhibition (each measuring at 96 x 72 inches) were made shortly after Young nearly died from contracting the H1N1 virus and falling into a week-long coma in 2010. What has followed from Young’s illness is an ongoing preoccupation with a central dilemma: the exact edge where boylike fantasy encounters violent truth. In these paintings, some of the first while recovering from his coma, Young pressed canvases down into pools of red shellac, letting the resin slowly drip, smear, and splatter like wounds. Other works during this period would further explore paintings through print-making perspectives by using the canvas itself or screen-printed images as a paintbrush.
With his use of shellac, a refined resin secreted by female lac insects, as well as his own blood incorporated into the handmade pigments, Young balances the frenetic aspirations of these paintings with bodily trauma and memory. The yellow and red pigments—reminiscent of “a strange skin of the brain,” as curator William Hamilton articulates, and, as Young recalls, of looking up at the lights in the hospital where he awoke from his coma—were meticulously crafted over several months and are reflective of the artist’s principal interest in examining the physical and emotional qualities of color.
Like the rowdy atmosphere of the movement to which these paintings allude, Listen to the Happys! presents both the promise and ultimate end of the free love era, the counterculture of Young’s youth, and perhaps the American Dream itself.
“I don’t remember making these paintings. They were made after waking up from a coma and having to relearn everything: language, animals, color. I was in a frenzy much like the disco fever of the time. Northern Soul. The Haçienda. The Wigan Casino. Stowaways on trains. Dancing until dawn.” – Russell Young
Russell Young, photo: Rocco Ceselin
Details
Listen to the Happys!
On view: February 8 – March 10, 2024
Opening hours: Thursday – Friday, 12 PM – 7 PM, Saturday, 2 PM – 8 PM
Location: 5500 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 102, Los Angeles, CA 90036
About Russell Young
Russell Young, born in 1959 in Yorkshire, is a British-American artist best known for his large scale silk screen paintings examining cultural icons, the nature of fame, and the souring of the American Dream.
His earliest breakthrough was his photography of George Michael for the sleeve of the album Faith in 1987. Young photographed many music stars throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including Morrissey, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, REM, The Smiths, Bauhaus, Diana Ross, Paul Newman, Björk, and many others. He went on to shoot over 100 music videos for leading artists during MTV’s height in the 1990s, which brought him to the United States.
Young eventually moved to California, where he began his current practice with his sold-out show Pig Portraits in Los Angeles in 2003. The many series that have followed, including his ongoing Heroes + Heroines and WEST, demonstrate his visceral, analog processes and signature use of diamond dust. He has exhibited across the world in numerous galleries alongside masterclass artists, institutions, and cultural figures. These include museum exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, Multimedia Art Museum Moscow, Cornell Art Museum, Polk Museum of Art, and the Goss-Michael Foundation. His genesis NFT debuted and sold on SuperRare in 2022.
Young’s work is included in many prominent private and institutional collections including those of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, David Bowie, Drake, Angelina Jolie, David Hockney, Kayne West, Brad Pitt, and others, as well as The Getty Collection in Los Angeles and The White House Collection in Washington, D.C. His works have crossed the auction block at all of the world’s major auction houses, including Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips.
He currently lives in Southern California.
Website: www.russellyoung.com
Instagram: @bankrobbercalifornia
Twitter: @_russellyoung
About Wienholt Projects
Aubrie Wienholt founded Wienholt Projects in 2023, following a 10+ year history of working with artists, galleries, museums, and other institutions. Wienholt Projects is committed to producing nontraditional exhibitions of works that interrogate and forward the field of art. Drawing from the experience of working with artists in an alternative capacity through PR for Artists, Wienholt’s creative agency and art house founded in 2015, Wienholt Projects is grounded in a unique understanding of artists’ holistic roles in society.
Website: www.wienholtprojects.com
Instagram: @wienholtprojects