Audrey Hepburn
1 work
Russell Young Brando Bike For Sale
Russell Young
Brando Bike, 2008
Hand-pulled screen print on linen in crimson and black
62 x 48 in ; 157.5 x 121.9 cm
Edition
Unique Impression
About this work
Brando Bike (2008) is a hand-pulled screenprint on linen by Russell Young, executed in crimson and black as a unique impression—an early work in the artist’s sustained investigation of Hollywood’s most enduring cultural icons. Measuring 62 by 48 inches (157.5 x 121.9 cm), the work presents Marlon Brando in what has become one of cinema’s most mythologised images: the actor as Johnny Strabler in The Wild One (1953), leather-jacketed and astride a motorcycle, the embodiment of a new kind of American masculinity that would define the culture of the 1950s and reverberate across the following decades. Young’s screenprinting process transforms this already-charged source image into an object of powerful graphic authority and physical presence. The palette of crimson and black is not merely aesthetic but deeply purposeful. Crimson—bold, visceral, and charged with connotations of danger and passion—amplifies the inherent drama of the Brando image, while the deep black of the shadows and contours grounds the composition in graphic certainty. Applied to the woven surface of linen, the hand-pulled inks of Young’s screenprinting process create a surface of richness and depth that photographic reproduction cannot replicate. Brando Bike is an object that must be encountered in person to be fully apprehended. Russell Young came to fine art after a career in photography that brought him into sustained contact with the world of celebrity, image-making, and popular culture. Brando Bike, one of his earliest major works, established many of the formal and conceptual preoccupations that have defined his practice since: the appropriation of culturally loaded photographic source material, the transformation of that material through the physical process of hand-pulled screenprinting, and the investigation of what celebrity images mean when they are re-made as objects rather than encountered as photographs. It remains one of his most viscerally compelling works.
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About the Brando Series
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.
About Russell Young
Russell Young (b. 1959, York, England) is a British-American artist known for large-scale silkscreen portraits of twentieth-century icons, finished in his signature hand-applied diamond dust. A former commercial photographer and music video director, Young turned to fine art in New York, breaking through with his 2001 "Pig Portraits" series before creating "Marilyn Crying" in 2005 — now one of contemporary Pop Art's most recognised images. Heavily influenced by Warhol, he has since portrayed Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie O, Kate Moss, and Mick Jagger. Represented by Guy Hepner, New York.