Brad Pitt Goes Public With Self-Reflection Sculptures

He's 'taking account of those I may have hurt, moments I have just gotten wrong'
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 20, 2022 10:05 AM CDT
Brad Pitt Goes Public With Self-Reflection Sculptures
British artist Thomas Houseago, center, poses with US actor Brad Pitt, right, and Australian musician Nick Cave prior to the opening of their joint exhibition in Tampere, Finland, on Saturday.   (Jussi Koivunen/Sara Hilden Art Museum, Lehtikuva via AP)

Following in the footsteps of fellow actor Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt is making his non-film-related art public for the first time. The 58-year-old shocked art lovers in Finland on Saturday when he showed up to exhibit nine sculptures at Sara Hilden Art Museum in Tampere. His involvement in the larger exhibition by British artist Thomas Houseago wasn't revealed in advance. Australian musician Nick Cave also debuted his art—17 ceramic figurines—for the first time at the exhibition titled "We." "For Nick and I, this is a new world and our first entry. It just feels right," Pitt told Finnish broadcaster Yle, per the Guardian.

His first ever sculpture, House A Go Go from 2017, a miniature house made from tree bark and held together with tape, is on display alongside a 2020 moulded plastic panel depicting a gunfight between eight figures, called Aiming At You I Saw Me But It Was Too Late This Time, per Art Newspaper. There's also a a clear silicone house shot with different gauges of ammunition. "To me it's about self-reflection. It's about where I have gotten it wrong in my relationships, where have I misstepped, where am I complicit," Pitt said, per the Guardian. "It was born out of ownership of what I call a radical inventory of self, getting really brutally honest with me and taking account of those I may have hurt, moments I have just gotten wrong."

Pitt began experimenting with pottery in Houseago's Los Angeles studio after his split from Angelina Jolie and eventually constructed a studio in his own home, per Art Newspaper. He previously told GQ that ceramics are a "solo, very quiet, very tactile kind of sport." Cave's works—17 glazed ceramic figurines "depicting the life of the Devil in 17 stations, from innocence through experience into confrontation of our mortality," according to a press release—were also created "in dialogue with the considerably more experienced Houseago," who unveiled several paintings, as well as new sculptures of plaster and redwood, per Art Newspaper. The works are on display until January. (More Brad Pitt stories.)

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