Adrien Brody, the Oscar-winning actor, has spent the past decade layering paint, newspaper clippings, and graffiti onto canvases in a visual echo of the New York City that shaped him. The problem is they are a relatively poor pastiche of Street Art and the type of work shown at any one of the Affordable Art Fairs.
His latest exhibition, Made in America, now open at Manhattan’s Eden Gallery until June 28, presents over 30 mixed-media works—part autobiography, part social critique—accompanied by his soundscapes. The outcome is generic. The Pop singer Robbie Williams pumps out similar tat.
The show is a collision of Brody’s artistic pursuits: painting, collage, and music. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Marilyn Monroe cliches share space with the Hamburglar and toy soldiers. At the same time, an interactive “gum wall” invites visitors to contribute chewed gum to an installation (Didn’t Dan Colin do this already?) Brody describes it as “rebellion and decay.” The works channel the aggression and energy of 1980s New York, where Brody, raised by Hungarian-American photographer Sylvia Plachy, soaked up the city’s visual noise—graffiti, tabloid ads, and the omnipresent hum of violence.
Brody is untrained as a visual artist; he undoubtedly grew up in an artistic household, but this hasn’t necessarily given him the ability to communicate in the visual art language. He credits his mother’s darkroom as his first studio. “He used to be the son of Sylvia Plachy,” she jokes. “Now I’m the mother of Adrien Brody!” Rejected from LaGuardia High School’s visual arts program, he turned to acting but never abandoned painting. His canvases, built through chemical erosion and collage, mirror his method as an actor: layering, then stripping away.
Critics are not convinced. Claire Bishop, an art historian at CUNY, dismisses the work as “sanitised Street Art.” At the same time, online detractors mock its derivative style, particularly after a Marilyn Monroe piece sold for $425,000 at amfAR’s Cannes gala. Brody shrugs it off. “I’d be a starving artist without acting,” he admits. For now, between film roles, he’s letting the work speak. Whether it’s rebellion or nostalgia, Made in America undeniably suggests, stay with your day job…. PCR
Tags
Adrien Brody, Eden Gallery, street art
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