Biography

“Most of my work deals with two aspects - fame and shame.”

Russell Young, born in 1959 in Yorkshire, is a British-American artist best known for his large scale silk screen paintings examining cultural icons, the nature of fame, and the souring of the American Dream.

His earliest breakthrough was his photography of George Michael for the sleeve of the album Faith in 1987. Young photographed many music stars throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including Morrissey, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, REM, The Smiths, Bauhaus, Diana Ross, Paul Newman, Björk, and many others. He went on to shoot over 100 music videos for leading artists during MTV’s height in the 1990s, which brought him to the United States.

Young eventually moved to California, where he began his current practice with his sold-out show Pig Portraits in Los Angeles in 2003. The many series that have followed, including his ongoing Heroes + Heroines and WEST, demonstrate his visceral, analog processes and signature use of diamond dust. He has exhibited across the world in numerous galleries alongside masterclass artists, institutions, and cultural figures. These include museum exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, Multimedia Art Museum Moscow, Cornell Art Museum, Polk Museum of Art, and the Goss-Michael Foundation. His genesis NFT debuted and sold on SuperRare in 2022.

Young’s work is included in many prominent private and institutional collections including those of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, David Bowie, Drake, Angelina Jolie, David Hockney, Kayne West, Brad Pitt, and others, as well as The Getty Collection in Los Angeles and The White House Collection in Washington, D.C. His works have crossed the auction block at all of the world's major auction houses, including Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips.

Young was born in Yorkshire in 1959. Adopted as a baby, he had an unsettled and isolated childhood. He studied photography, film and graphic design at Chester Art College where he studied under Jack Straw, whom he attributes as one of the few geniuses he has ever met and the person who “showed him out of the darkness and brutality of Northern England”. He later moved on to London, where he struggled to make a living. After months on the streets he was taken on as an assistant by photographer Christos Raftopoulos, who mentored him and who helped him to forge his own identity as a commercial photographer.  Young developed his own projects and began to make a name for himself shooting live gigs of bands such as Bauhaus, REM and The Smiths, which led to multiple commissions from magazines and record companies.  His sleeve imagery for George Michael’s ‘Faith’ album, which sold over 25 million copies, brought even more high-profile portrait commissions for artists such as Morrissey, Björk, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Diana Ross.

In 1991 he moved to Los Angeles and established himself in the music industry, going on to direct over 100 videos for MTV. Despite his success, he became increasingly disenchanted by the corporate lack of creativity in the industry and in 2000 travelled to Tuscany for a month to rediscover himself.  Realising he really wanted to pursue a career as a fine artist, he relocated to New York and rented a studio in Brooklyn.  His first solo exhibition, ‘Pig Portraits’,  which depicted raw celebrity mug shots,  was a complete about turn from the airbrushed images he had sought to achieve in his music videos. The series brought him to the attention of the art world and launched his career as a fine artist.  

In 2005 he returned to California with his family and held his ‘Fame + Shame’ series with the Art of Elysium, which documented the fallout from the cultural excesses of the past. 

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