Brad Pitt has made his debut as a sculptor, in a group show at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland. The A-List actor's artworks appear alongside those by the musician Nick Cave and the artist Thomas Houseago for the exhibition "We," on view until January 15, 2023.
Among the nine works by Pitt on show are a house-shaped structure molded in clear silicon and shot with bullets, and his first ever sculpture, from 2017, "House A Go Go": an 18-inch miniature house made out of tree bark, crudely held together with tape.
The largest pieces include a coffin-sized bronze box depicting hands, feet and faces attempting to break through the structure at various angles, and the plaster wall-hanging sculpture "Aiming At You I Saw Me But It Was Too Late This Time," from 2020, which depicts a gun fight between eight figures. The "Bullet Train" star reportedly began making ceramic art, following his turbulent divorce from the actress Angelina Jolie, in 2017.
In an emailed statement to The Art Newspaper, Pitt said of his artistic turn: "For me it's about self reflection... It was born out of ownership over what I call a 'radical inventory of the self'. And getting really brutally honest with me and taking account of those I may have hurt and the moments I've just gotten wrong."
Meanwhile, the Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave (not to be confused with the American visual and performance artist of the same name) is also making his artistic debut: he shows "glazed ceramic figurines depicting the life of Satan in 17 stations, from innocence through experience into confrontation of our mortality," according to a press release.
"The Devil: A Life" is Cave's first major body of visual work. It includes 17 individual pieces ranging between 6 and 19.5 inches tall, each hand-crafted, painted and glazed by Cave in England, between 2020 and 2022. Aesthetically the series nods to the artist's interest in Victorian Staffordshire Flatback figurines, of which he is a collector. Both fledgling sculptors created these works in dialogue with the considerably more experienced Houseago. The British artist has been practicing for nearly three decades and showed work at the Whitney Biennial in 2010.
In Tampere, Houseago, who is better known as a sculptor, shows a number of paintings, a medium he began experimenting with in recent years. The works come from his large-scale "Visions" series that was made outdoors and was inspired by European symbolists including Norway's Edvard Munch. He also shows new sculptures made from redwood and plaster that he made in response to works in the collection of the Sara Hildén Foundation, such as Alberto Giacometti's sculpture "Woman on a Chariot" from 1943 to 1962.
Speaking of his decision to stage a collaborative show between himself, Cave and Pitt, Houseago said in the press statement: "I am not an I. I'm a WE!"
