Here we a bronze pop art sculpture of a paint brush by renown sculptor Stephen Maxon. Stop the Mundanity! This underground gem has all the bells and whistles of a household paint brush, with about a ton more weight. It's crazy holding this brute because it feels like your wrist is going to snap in two. When you hang this one on your wall, you're going to have to find a stud to secure the weight. This brick will fly right through drywall. So of course, it's one of my favorite pieces.
The pop art sculpture comes out of a Twin Cities collector's estate. I was told she had too much money and too much time. She spent both on traveling to faraway lands picking up rare and unusual bronze sculptures. Not sure about the first part, but the last part is certainly true. The sculpture was likely made in the 1990s or early 2000s. The piece is not signed.
Here's a brief description of Pop Art courtesy of Wikipedia:
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s. The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane mass-produced cultural objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular (as opposed to elitist) culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony. It is also associated with the artists' use of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques. In pop art, material is sometimes visually removed from its known context, isolated, or combined with unrelated material.
Here's a biography of
Stephen Maxon courtesy of his website:
Born into a family of itinerant acrobats, young Stephen went lost in the western wilderness, having dropped out of the back of a medicine-show wagon. Living on snake venom and cactus thorns, the toddler was adopted and raised by wolves. Later, after being rescued by cowboys, he rode from town to town on bucking broncos searching for his parents and eking out a meager living wrestling grizzly bears.
Knighted at fourteen, he became a mercenary in Central Africa struggling to protect endangered plants and wildlife and continuing his search for his long-lost family. Laboring to discover new strains of communicable diseases, he worked tirelessly to stomp out athelete's foot and halitosis.
He began sculpting at six months, twisting the bars of his play pen into a striking likeness of the family dog. Later he studied with Donatello, Giacommetti and Rodin, teaching the later all he knew. After years of study and toil, Maxon renounced his MFA to become an outsider artist. Finding casting much less difficult than bending steel bars with his teeth, he developed new ways of melting metal via thought control.
After making and losing several fortunes, he currently lives in a trailer in rural Iowa receiving messages from outer space in his dental fillings. He enjoys telling lies and chewing gum.
The Stephen Maxon bronze measures 11" tall, 4" wide and 1" deep. There is wicked bronze corrosion and patina throughout the piece, Solid is an understatement. Please see all pics as they are part of the description.
I ship FedEx to street addresses in the continental USA only (no PO boxes). Free shipping on the pop art bronze sculpture.
Mundane or Insane....two sides of the same coin. Unreal.
