Action-packed painting
Sylvester Stallone shows his art in Hagen
Sylvester Stallone in front of one of his paintings in the Osthaus Museum in Hagen. Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
He is world famous as Rocky or Rambo. But the beginnings of Sylvester Stallone’s career as an action hero lie in art – as the first German exhibition of his painting in Hagen shows.
The Hollywood star takes the stage in the Osthaus Museum in Hagen with a powerful “Good Morning”.
A little later, when Sylvester Stallone saw the presentation of his own works on the museum walls for the first time, he almost seemed a little intimidated by his role that day: Sylvester Stallone is not here as a boxing fist-clenching action icon, he is presenting the most private of all Arts as he calls them: his own painting.
When you paint, you only have “yourself and your soul,” he says in an interview with the German Press Agency. In contrast to filmmaking, where you can always blame someone or something for the failure: as a painter, he can only rely on himself.
53 paintings can be seen in Hagen
It is the first time that Stallone shows this long-unknown side of his work in Germany. The retrospective in the traditional exhibition house in the Ruhr area «Sylvester Stallone. Best of Life »brings together 53 original paintings, including works from the 1960s that have never been shown to large-format works from the more recent present.
Large-format hero figures are included, sometimes reduced to their outlines, sometimes sprayed onto the canvas with a paint can and stencil like a wall graffito. Stallone himself describes the painting process as rather spontaneous (“The one behind me should become a horse – and see what has become of it”), sometimes therapeutic. He is always especially good when he is bad, says Stallone. “Who wants to paint in a good mood on a beautiful day?”
Over the decades, paintings have emerged that museum director Tayfun Belgin aptly describes as “brightly colored, powerfully shaped, sometimes with exaggeration”. “A kind of figurative-expressive style”, for which he was inspired by surrealism, expressionism and abstract painting.
“I tend to show my true nature in my pictures, and it’s action-packed – really true. That’s how I am, ”says Stallone of the dpa. And so for most of his work he was not sure whether people could do something with his art – or whether they might even be frightened. It was only a few years ago that the Gmurzynska Gallery persuaded it to hold an exhibition in Switzerland. Museum shows soon followed in St. Petersburg (2013), Nice (2015) and now: Hagen.
The sketch for “Rocky” like a cave drawing
The painting “Finding Rocky”, dated 1975, shows that painting was inextricably linked with Stallone’s filmmaking work, even with his rise to the screen legend, decades before: A muscle pack with a melancholy look, the New York Bronx threatening in the background . Stallone scratched the very first idea of the boxing legend into the paint with a screwdriver, trying to make it look archaic, like a cave drawing.
Only then did Stallone – frustrated by his sluggish acting career – write the screenplay for the multi-Oscar-winning film “Rocky”, the American legend about the rise of a bone breaker to boxing champion. Even the first sketch of his life role could pass for a self-portrait of the young Stallone: He literally carved himself on Rocky.
But is it more than his famous name that brings Stallone to such a museum exhibition? “It’s very good art,” his gallery owner Mathias Rastorfer, CEO of Galerie Gmurzynska, is convinced. And museum director Belgin agrees: “This power of painting shows a thoroughbred painter, just as he appears in his films as a thoroughbred actor.” Of course, a big name makes it easier. “But you can ruin a good name with bad pictures”, this is where a good name meets good pictures.
The exhibition in Hagen will be open to visitors from Saturday and will be on view until February 22, 2022.