RUSELL YOUNG (England, 1959). "Kate Moss" 2015. Mixed media on canvas. Signed, titled and dated on

RUSELL YOUNG (England, 1959). "Kate Moss" 2015. Mixed media on canvas. Signed, titled and dated on the back. Measurements: 159.5 x 121 cm,; 163 x 124 cm. (frame). Russell Young is a British-American artist known for his large screen-printed paintings with images drawn from recent history and popular culture. His artistic output includes painting, screenprinting, sculpture, installations and film. In the 1990s, Young abandoned photography and directing altogether and began painting in earnest. In 1998 he moved to New York, rented a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and worked on a series of "Combination Paintings," collage assemblages, found objects and street graffiti. In 2001, he began a series called "Pig Portraits". He had acquired the photos of musicians, actors and political figures and blew them up in the form of bold, colorful screen-printed portraits of Sid Vicious, Elvis Presley, Jane Fonda, Malcolm X, Steve McQueen, Frank Sinatra and Lee Harvey Oswald. "They were intended to be anti-celebrity portraits. I guess to give a nod to my earlier career. As an outlet. But they ended up ... I think they look better than some of the sessions." He first exhibited the Pig Portraits at the Don O'Melveny Gallery in Los Angeles in 2003. The Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas held a retrospective of Young's work in the winter of 2012. He also exhibited a series of large-scale paintings titled Only Anarchists are Pretty in the main gallery. He cut out 1970s photographs of bound women and placed them in large "unimaginable orgies of claustrophobic assemblage" and titled from the council estates of Britain's deprived areas - Thorntree, Nant Peris, the Gorbals. An idea borrowed from Joy Division which names itself after the sex-slavery rooms of Nazi concentration camps, recounted in House of Dolls. In October 2018, Russell Young Superstar, opened at the Shanghai Museum of Modern Art, a former coal yard on the banks of the Huangpu River.