Russell Young — Brando For Sale

Brando

Russell Young's Brando series presents Marlon Brando in one of cinema's most enduringly mythologized images — the actor as Johnny Strabler in The Wild One (1953), leather-jacketed and astride a motorcycle, an image that helped define a new form of rebellious American masculinity across the decades that followed. Produced between 2008 and 2009 as hand-pulled screenprints on linen, the series represents one of Young's earliest sustained investigations of Hollywood's most enduring cultural icons, establishing formal and conceptual concerns that would carry through his subsequent decades of practice.

Rendered in crimson and black, and separately in cream and black, the two colorways in the series take markedly different approaches to the same charged source image — crimson amplifying the drama and danger inherent in the Brando mythology, cream and black offering a cooler, more restrained treatment of the same iconic pose. Both versions rely on Young's hand-pulled screenprinting process on linen, creating a surface richness that flat photographic reproduction cannot replicate.

As an early work in Young's practice, Brando Bike established the appropriation-and-transformation methodology that continues to define his approach: taking culturally loaded, already-mythologized photographic source material and re-making it as a physical object through hand-pulled printing, rather than simply reproducing the image. It remains one of his most viscerally compelling and frequently cited early works.

Guy Hepner offers Brando works for sale in both available colorways. Collectors interested in acquiring a piece, or in selling an existing work, are welcome to contact our New York gallery to discuss current availability and pricing.