Russell Young, born in 1959 in Yorkshire, England, is a British-American artist best known for his large -cale silk screen paintings examining cultural icons, the nature of fame, and the souring of the American Dream.
He studied photography, film and graphic design at the University of Chester and attended Exeter College of Art and Design in England.
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 peak 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 master 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 Barack Obama, David Bowie, David Hockney, Marc Jacobs, The Estate of Marilyn Monroe, and others, as well as The Albertina Museum in Vienna, The Saatchi Collection in London, The Getty Collection in Los Angeles and The White House Collection in Washington, D.C. His works have also crossed the auction block at all of the world's major auction houses, including Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips.
