Marilyn Manson rockstar/Artist…
From the beginning Manson has been a recreational painter, the oldest of his surviving pieces dating back to 1995, which he typically painted in order to trade the finished works for drugs with drug dealers. It wasn’t until after his 1998 Grey period that Manson began his career as a watercolor painter. In 1999 he made five-minute concept pieces and traded them for drugs, with the knowledge that they may accumulate in value over time. Gradually Manson became more drawn to watercolors as an art form in itself, and instead of trading them, kept them and continued to paint at a proficient rate.
This manic creativity resulted in an exhibit for his art, The Golden Age of Grotesque, held at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions Centre between September 13 and 14 of 2002. The reaction to his paintings was largely positive with one critic comparing them to Egon Schiele’s pieces and describing them as heartfelt and sincerely painted, and Art in America went as far as to liken them to the works of a ‘psychiatric patient given materials to use as therapy’. Others however saw less merit in the works stating that the value was in the celebrity.
Two years later almost to the day, during September 14 and 15 of 2004, Manson held his second exhibit, Trismegistus, on the first night in Paris and the second in Berlin. Again the reception to the works could be described as mixed but was largely in favour of the artist.
Manson opened his own art gallery, The Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art, on October 31, 2006 in Los Angeles for which his third exhibition (by invitation or appointment only, after the opening night) was the inaugural show. From April 2 until April 17, 2007 Manson’s recent works were put on display at the Space 39 Modern & Contemporary Gallery Exhibition in Florida. 40 pieces from this show were ported to the Gallery Schenk in Cologne, Germany to be publicly exhibited from June 28 until July 28, 2007, after which they were returned to the Space 39 Modern & Contemporary Gallery.
Manson’s next retrospective was on display at 101/exhibit in Miami’s Design District thru Feb 20th 2009.
In 2010 Manson’s an exhibition billed as “Hell, Etc.”, was held in Athens, Greece at the Athenian Culture Centre throughout April 2010. In 2011 an exhibition for Manson’s work was held at the Vienna Kunsthalle, “Genealogies of Pain”. At the end of 2011, from November through to February 5 2012, 212 Productions staged an exhibition of Manson’s paintings under the title of The Path of Misery. Manson explained at the event’s launch that he had chosen paintings which he felt represented milestones on his path out of misery, something he also chronicles on eighth album Born Villain.
