Artist: Sid Maurer
Title: Sylvester Stallone (from the Portraits of Luminaries Collection)
Year created: 2010
Medium: Original Mixed Media Artwork on Wood Board
Edition: Original Unique Artwork, Hand-Signed by the Artist
Height (inches): 24
Width (inches): 18
Signed twice by the artist
Signed Area: front & back
Also Titled and Dated on back
This piece is unframed.
Description of piece:
Sid Maurer’s mastery as a fine artist is evident in his strikingly accurate, personal and intuitive portraits of luminaries.
Imbued with warmth and vibrancy, Maurer’s portraits capture the essence of his subjects, and synthesize Maurer’s artistic vision with his technical and compositional roots in graphic design. Bold, visible paint texturing and layering bring added light, depth and dimensionality to the artwork.
An original mixed media painting on wood board, Maurer’s self-titled Sylvester Stallone measures 24” in height x 18” width. Maurer has depicted Stallone in his prime, in his iconic titular role in the critically acclaimed film Rocky.
The artwork is signed twice by the artist: first, on the front of the artwork, lower left, prominently in a large vertical signature in black; and on the reverse, where Maurer has also titled and dated the work.
Sylvester Stallone is accompanied by its original Certificate of Authenticity from Allan Rich, Sid Maurer’s gallerist and lifelong personal friend. In addition to representing artists with Hollywood ties, Allan Rich was himself a well-known character actor, author and acting coach. The COA includes a photograph of the artwork; a photograph of, and personal statement by, the artist; and is signed and dated by Allan Rich.
SYLVESTER STALLONE (born Michael Sylvester Gardenzio Stallone) is an actor, screenwriter, director, and producer. After his beginnings as a struggling actor for a number of years upon arriving to New York City in 1969 and later Hollywood in 1974, he won his first critical acclaim as an actor for his co-starring role as Stanley Rosiello in The Lords of Flatbush. Stallone subsequently found gradual work as an extra or side character in high-budget films until he achieved his greatest critical and commercial success as an actor, starting in 1976 with his self-created role as boxer Rocky Balboa, in the first film of the successful Rocky series (1976–present). In the films, Rocky is portrayed as an underdog boxer who fights numerous brutal opponents, and wins the world heavyweight championship twice.
In 1977, Stallone was the third actor in cinema to be nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actor. Stallone's film Rocky was inducted into the National Film Registry, and had its props placed in the Smithsonian Museum. Stallone's use of the front entrance to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the Rocky series led the area to be nicknamed the Rocky Steps. Philadelphia has a statue of his character Rocky placed permanently near the museum, and he was voted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Following the success of Rocky, Stallone starred in the highly successful action film First Blood in which he portrayed the PTSD-plagued soldier John Rambo. He would play the role in a total of five Rambo films (1982–2019). From the mid 1980s through to the late 1990s, Stallone would go on to become one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors of that era by appearing in a slew of commercially successful action films, including Cobra, Tango and Cash, Cliffhanger, Demolition Man, and The Specialist.
In 2015, Stallone returned to the Rocky series with Creed, that serve as spin-off films focusing on Adonis "Donnie" Creed played by Michael B. Jordan, the son of the ill-fated boxer Apollo Creed, to whom the long-retired Rocky is a mentor. Reprising the role brought Stallone praise, and his first Golden Globe award for the first Creed, as well as a third Oscar nomination, having been first nominated for the same role 40 years prior.
Stallone is the only actor in the history of U.S. cinema to have starred in a box office number one film across five consecutive decades.
Artist bio:
Sid Maurer's (1926-2017) long career spanned decades in the world of Art and Music, beginning at age seventeen when he was hired as Assistant Art Director at Columbia Records in New York City. When the music industry exploded, Maurer designed album covers and promotional material for popular artists, alongside Columbia Records colleague Andy Warhol. Maurer expanded his commercial art studio to tackle a wide range of projects for the music and film industries, while his striking artistic style developed, influenced by artists he met including Pollack and Rauschenberg.
Maurer left the empire of music and art that he had helped to build to focus on his passion: painting. In the last decade, his work has been shown in a wide variety of venues, including the Georgia Capitol, the Carnegie Museum and U.C.L.A. His commissioned artwork includes work for ESPN, MotorSport America Magazine, David Bowie, Boy George, and Donovan.
As a painter, Maurer created large mixed media pieces that were very much a product of his varied training and experience. His style combined bold, dynamic colors and strokes with painstaking layouts and typographical elements. The result is the unique blend of a painter's passion tempered with the calculating compositional eye of a graphic designer, exploring his themes through the use of bold subject matter, symbols and graphics.