A launch event at Art Miami this December reveals new paintings by Russell Young and kicks off the 2026 centennial tribute, featuring exclusive collaborations with the Marilyn Monroe Estate and premiere lifestyle partners.
In 2026, the world will mark 100 years of Marilyn Monroe. A launch event at Art Miami has revealed new paintings by the artist and kicks off the 2026 centennial tribute, featuring exclusive collaborations with the Marilyn Monroe Estate and premiere lifestyle partners.
MARILYN 100 is his yearlong program of exhibitions, new artworks, and exclusive events around the globe – created in collaboration with the Marilyn Monroe Estate and Authentic Brands Group (Authentic), steward of Monroe’s legacy, alongside premier lifestyle partners. MARILYN 100 serves as the artistic kick-off to the broader 2026 centennial celebrations led by Authentic.
Marilyn Monroe was one of the first celebrities to become an image, defining the visual vocabulary of the 20th century. Andy Warhol’s 1962 Marilyn Diptych cemented her as a pop icon and an enduring commentary on fame, the construction of self, and media saturation—themes that continue to define contemporary culture. Young, who in fact owns a printmaking press once used by Warhol, carries that legacy into the 21st century with hand-pulled, silk screen paintings that are an eternal mirror of American culture.
Young’s Monroe paintings capture “a time and place when the world watched on as the American Dream appeared to dramatically unravel, a decade that held witness to the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.” Young’s distinct and evocative treatment of Monroe’s image reflects both the turbulence of her era and the ongoing cultural obsession that continues to shape how we see fame today.
Described as a “voluntary keeper and interpreter of some of the most captivating and subversive images ever recorded,” Young has built his practice around immortalizing icons and cultural phenomena through diamond-dusted silk screen paintings, making him the ideal artist to reimagine Monroe’s image for her centennial year.
Throughout 2026, Young’s MARILYN 100 program will travel internationally, including appearances at all Formula 1 races in 2026, exhibitions, and collaborative projects with Authentic Brands Group and the Marilyn Monroe Estate. Young in collaboration with Piper-Heidsieck has embellished his signature diamond dusted Marilyn’s onto 12 champagne bottles, and Piper-Heidsieck will sponsor key events, and select limited-edition merchandise, including black Champion sweatshirts featuring Monroe, will engage collectors and fans alike.
Young is exhibiting a wall of 28 Marilyn Crying paintings as well as new paintings and screen prints from the MARILYN 100 at Art Miami (December 2nd – 7th, 2025) with Taglialatella Galleries.
The series of 28 Marilyn Crying paintings are hand-painted and hand-pulled in glorious colors, and were previously exhibited at Young’s Superstar exhibition at the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai. The forthcoming centennial tribute will debut tomorrow December 5th, 2025, at an exclusive launch event at Art Miami by Taglialatella Galleries and hosted by Authentic Brands Group, unveiling a series of the artist’s new Marilyn paintings created in collaboration with the Marilyn Monroe Estate, which has given Young full access to their archives. In addition to these new paintings, Young will be releasing a body of Marilyn works from his personal archives.
About the artist
Russell Young (b. 1959, Northern England) builds a visually seductive yet psychologically incisive practice that interrogates the machinery of fame, desire and cultural memory. Working primarily with large-scale screenprints, he pulls images from the endless archive of pop history—Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Sid Vicious, police mugshots, political icons—and subjects them to processes that heighten both their glamour and their vulnerability. His surfaces, often encrusted with shimmering diamond dust, appear initially as pure spectacle: gleaming, glamorous, almost irresistible. But beneath that brilliance lies a deeper, more ambivalent terrain.
Young draws from his background in photography and music culture, filtering each image through a personal understanding of how icons are constructed, consumed and undone. By enlarging familiar faces to monumental proportions, he exposes the sediment of myth-making—the way public figures become screens onto which society projects fantasy, excess, tragedy and aspiration. His celebrity portraits hover between adoration and critique, capturing the magnetic pull of the spotlight while revealing the darker edges that often accompany it.
Throughout his practice, Young explores the tension between surface and substance. Colour palettes veer from lush, cinematic saturation to stark monochromes; images are cropped, repeated or distilled until they feel more like relics than reproductions. The grit of screenprinting remains present—slippages, imperfections, the slight corrosion of an image passed through multiple hands and histories. The diamond dust, meanwhile, functions like a double-edged gesture: seductive and gleaming, yet also suggesting fragility, decay and the hollow shimmer of unattainable ideals.
While much of Young’s work engages directly with celebrity, it also speaks more broadly to how societies construct narratives of power, beauty, rebellion and downfall. By isolating iconic moments—sometimes triumphant, sometimes notorious—he reframes them as meditations on collective longing and cultural amnesia. The tension between the image we think we know and the truth it conceals becomes the engine of his work.
Across decades, Russell Young has refined a language that is visually bold, culturally sharp and emotionally layered. His portraits do more than reproduce fame; they probe its architecture. In their scale, texture and intensity, they ask viewers to confront the allure of the image and the shadows that flicker just behind it—inviting a slower, more critical form of looking at the icons who shape, haunt and captivate our shared imagination. @bankrobbercalifornia
