A provocative figure in street art, Mr. Brainwash (a pseudonym for Thierry Guetta) recontextualizes images from popular culture and art history and incorporates them into his wry screen prints and sculptures. Mr. Brainwash’s colorful texts and iconography reflect the artist’s graffiti-inspired sensibility and undermine his original source material. The artist rose to prominence as the main figure in the 2010 Banksy-directed film Exit Through the Gift Shop. Today, his work sells for up to six figures on the secondary market. Mr. Brainwash has also designed album covers for the likes of Madonna and Rick Ross.
Mr. Brainwash, Diamond Girl – Marilyn Monroe (Silver) is a silkscreen with diamond dust on paper. From the limited edition of 90. This print is signed and numbered with Mr. Brainwash’s thumbprint and date on verso.
Marilyn’s beaded Jean Louis gown, worn when she sang Happy Birthday to President Kennedy, was sold in 1999 for £820,000. At the time it was the record price for a single item of clothing, until Marilyn’s billowing white Seven Year Itch dress was put up for sale by Debbie Reynolds in 2011, where it made £2.8 million.
Marilyn’s intervention got Ella Fitzgerald her first major engagement at a Los Angeles nightclub. In 1955 the colour bar was still in force, but Marilyn convinced the management to let Fitzgerald play by promising to sit in the front row for a week. Marilyn had a fixation on Clark Gable, her co-star in The Misfits; as a young girl, Marilyn dreamed that he was her father. When he died, she said that she cried for two days. She preferred to go naked. Among female studio employees – wardrobe mistresses, hairdressers, make-up artists – she often went without clothes. She gave interviews in the nude and often went out wearing nothing under the black mink that Joe DiMaggio had given her.