Mr. Brainwash Museum
August 25, 2024
When you were a 12 year old kid and on a school field trip dragged to a museum did you ever dream it could be fun? Perhaps the Natural History museum. What kid doesn’t like dinosaurs? More likely it was a museum with paintings … boring. Mr. Brainwash Museum is the delightful, whimsical and dare I say, genius creation of entrepreneur, documentary filmmaker and street artist Thierry Guetta of Garges-les-Gonesse, France. Based in Los Angeles, Thierry is known for his hyper-visual creations, and showcases his and the work of other artists he came to know through his documentary work.
The Beverly Hills museum is the current pop-up exhibit in the once-Paley Center of Media building and is described as “the first contemporary art museum created and run by a living artist.” The building, slated for demolition is a 3-story space featuring whimsical interpretations of modern culture through altered images of famous paintings, sculpture, and step-in dioramas.
Portraits of Tupac Shakur as graffiti artist fronted by a boom-box, Steve Jobs as I-phone gunslinger with a Mac and keyboard and Kobe Bryant as a warrior with giant basketball, (museum visitors included for scale) command the first floor display space.
A few of my favorite sculptures are piano representations, along with the Rodin’s Thinker sitting on a railing overlooking the first floor. Oh yes, there is the T-Rex made entirely of books.
This painting of Van Gogh’s bedroom at the asylum in Provence caught my eye as I was there last fall.
More scenes from the museum …
There is a lot more to Mr. Brainwash than I could cover in one visit. If it wasn’t 3,000 miles from my home I would visit monthly as Guetta changes the exhibits frequently. Art is enjoyed on various levels, this art is on a different strata than most, clever in its interpretations and elevated in its lightheartedness. Someday the former Paley Center for Media will come down and that will be too bad. If you can get to Beverly Hills to visit Mr. Brainwash, do it.