“You know, maybe I should be a painter,” Sylvester Stallone said Friday as he opened the biggest ever re-exhibition of his paintings. “It will certainly mean a lot less stress.”
NS Rocky, Rambo and Accounts payable the star made the trip to Hagen in western Germany for the opening Sylvester Stallone: The Miracle of Being, an exhibition at the Osthaus Hagen Museum, runs from Saturday to February 20. Stallone has previously had several public exhibitions of his art, including a 2013 exhibition at the museum. Russian State Museum in St.Petersburg and a 2015 exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, France. But the Hagen show is by far the most comprehensive, tracing Stallone’s entire journey, from the late sixties to the present day.
“It is a great honor to have my work hung here, alongside some of the greatest artists in the world,” Stallone said. “This gallery world is still a very new world to me.”
Stallone began painting at an early age, inspired by the experimental work of “action painters” such as Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning, whose influence can be seen in earlier works. on display here, which he signed “Mike Stallone”. It was only when these early works failed to sell—“I used to sell them for $5 for the bus,” he recalls—that Stallone turned to writing and began his acting career. .
But there are strong thematic connections between Stallone’s acting and his art. Some of his paintings are Rambo and Rock themed, explores his most famous on-screen characters and their impact on popular culture. Rocky was, in fact, a painting before it was a movie. In his 1975 work Find Rocky, Stallone explores the personality of an incompetent boxer who has a chance to do just that.
“Why is the elephant in the room displaying celebrity art? Is it about art or about celebrities? ” Mathias Rastorfer of the Gmurzynska Gallery in St. said Moritz, who helped manage the Hagen exhibition. “I remember people asking the same question when we first exhibited Karl Lagerfeld’s work. Now, every art museum in the world wants to display Largerfeld’s work… The same goes for Stallone.”
Despite the belated recognition of his talent for painting, Stallone has no plans to give up his day job. He recently released his director’s cut of Rocky IV [Rocky vs. Drago] and currently filming the fourth one Accounts payable movie.
