“I’m a little in a daze,” the actor Adrien Brody said last Tuesday, the skin around his eyes slightly crinkled, but his gaze soft and present. He’d been up since 5 a.m. and had spent most of his day crouched on the ground at Eden Gallery in Manhattan, putting the finishing touches on his collages ahead of the next evening’s opening of his latest solo exhibition, “Made in America.”
The floors and walls were covered with canvases, themselves covered with old newspaper advertisements, erratic splashes of graffiti and darkly rendered cartoon characters. Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe were in attendance. As were the Hamburglar and a toy soldier. In a nearby corner was an empty gum wall, soon to be covered in wads of chewing gum straight from the mouths of attendees in an interactive “expression of rebellion and decay,” according to the wall text.
Adrien Brody, the Oscar-winning actor, is also Adrien Brody, the impassioned painter, is also Adrien Brody, the beats-mixing sound artist. Those mediums converge in a collection of more than 30 works. Accompanied by Brody’s soundscapes, the show features large mixed media art in what he calls an autobiographical display of the gritty New York of his youth, and the culture of violence and intolerance today. It’s an approach that has been met with some derision both in the art press and on social media.
“Made in America,” on view until June 28, also includes photographs of and by his mother, the acclaimed Hungarian American photographer Sylvia Plachy — a role model for Brody, who was never formally trained in visual art.
It’s been nearly a decade since Brody, 52, last showed his work publicly, at Art Basel Miami. So why now?
“I’m an unemployed actor at the moment,” he said with a half smile.
Though it’s difficult to picture Brody as unemployed, especially when which his artworks sell for six figures, this isn’t untrue. The last film Brody shot was in 2023 for “The Brutalist,” for which he won the Oscar for best actor this year, and nothing definite is lined up next.
“I know that if I don’t do it now, I won’t do it for another long period of time,” he said of the show. “It’s kind of this time to let it go.”
Brody has been steadily working on his collages for the past decade. In the fallow periods, yearslong stretches when he wasn’t landing the acting roles he yearned for, he turned inward and painted.
The method in all of his mediums, he said, is a combination of layering (be it the incorporation of studied hand mannerisms for his character in “The Pianist” or the added thumps for a recorded track) and peeling back (using chemicals to degrade paint for a visual work; stripping away pretenses as an actor).
Brody, who credits his mother as his greatest artistic inspiration, grew up accompanying Plachy on photo expeditions as she chronicled the city’s beauty and chaos on assignments for The Village Voice, where she worked for 30 years.
“He came along and he saw the world,” Plachy, 82, said.
In her darkroom, set up in their home attic in Queens, they would talk to each other through the curtain while she developed her photographs, moving the images from tray to tray, swirling them around in Dektol.
“He still associates me with those bad chemicals,” she said, laughing.
His father, Elliot Brody, was also a painter but focused on his career as a teacher. It was onto Plachy’s discarded photo prints that Brody began painting as a child.
“He used to be the son of Sylvia Plachy,” she said warmly. “Now I’m the mother of Adrien Brody!”
As a teenager, Brody attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts for drama, after being rejected for visual arts.
“It was a good thing, obviously,” he said. “I’d definitely be a starving artist, most likely, if I didn’t have an acting career. So it’s funny how that happened.”
On weekdays he took four trains from his home in Woodhaven, Queens, to get to school, and on his long commute became enamored with the graffitied walls and etched tags on the plastic windows — a city “bursting with energy and aggression” of a different time, he said.
In “Made in America,” many works feature a cartoon — Lisa Simpson or Yosemite Sam or Bugs Bunny — brandishing a weapon. It’s a depiction of the violence Brody said he grew up with culturally: an American diet of toy guns, video games and McDonald’s.
“What we’re fed as children is constant imagery of ubiquitous violence,” he said. “I think that there are repercussions to that, and we are experiencing those.”
In Brody’s vermin series, oversized black and white images of rats appear to pixelate behind street art tags.
People are “either grossed out by them, or they are antagonistic toward them,” Brody said of the scores of rats in New York City. “And I always felt like, ‘Why doesn’t anybody see what they’re going through?’ Weirdly, I really kind of feel for them.”
That compassion, he said, comes from his mother. Plachy’s sensitivity toward animals rubbed off on him. So much so that he’s had a pet rat. Twice. The first he bought as a child and then gifted to a friend; the second, a few years ago, belonged to the daughter of his girlfriend, Georgina Chapman.
“They’re forced to kind of hide and scurry about and forge for themselves, and are being poisoned by kind of this kind of campaign to eradicate them,” he said. “And people are nasty to them and that always bothered me.”
That message, though, appears to be muddied in its reception.
“Brody is trying to do something with mice and rats, but there’s no attempt to marshal this imagery toward contemporary critique,” Claire Bishop, a professor of art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, said in an email, calling his collages “too pretty and too even” and “lacking bite.”
“To say they look like A.I.-generated images resulting from search terms ‘90s LES graffiti’ ‘Americana’ and ‘Disney nostalgia’ would be too generous,” Bishop said. “What they actually resemble is the kind of sanitized street art that’s sold on 53rd Street outside MoMA or on the sidewalk in SoHo — work aimed at tourists seeking an arty yet unchallenging New York souvenir.”
And viewers on social media haven’t taken too kindly to Brody’s painterly side. Last month, one of Brody’s creations, a blue-eyeshadowed Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood sign poking out behind a puff of her blonde hair, sold at the amfAR Cannes Gala for $425,000. The painting became a source of mockery online, and drew criticism for being derivative.
Writing for Artnet, the columnist Annie Armstrong lopped Brody into a growing trend of “red-chip art,” styles once dismissed as tacky — often involving a graffiti aesthetic — that sit at the other end of the spectrum from blue-chip art, whose traditional galleries exhibit established names in the rarefied world of fine art.
“He’s real,” said Guy Klimovsky, Eden Gallery’s chief executive. “He is himself.”
“Yes, people will come because it’s him,” he continued, “but they will forget. Because when I see an artwork, without knowing who made it, the artworks are rich. They’re interesting. They have a story connection to the U.S., the story of the U.S., to the icon of the U.S.”
It’s all part of being an artist, his mother said.
“I think when you stick your neck out into the world you’ll have good and bad comments and that’s the risk of it,” Plachy said.
Sitting outside the gallery the day before the opening, Brody looked down at his hands, covered in acrylic paint.
“It’s a lot of pressure to reveal this,” he said. “I’ve literally been hiding the works.”
“Hiding maybe isn’t the right word,” he added, “but working quietly for a very long time and not showing, intentionally, to kind of develop this and do it at my pace. And so this is kind of ripping a band aid off.”
Rachel Sherman reports on culture and the arts for The Times.
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