Artist: Sid Maurer
Title: David Bowie (Aladdin Sane)
Year created: 2010
Medium: Mixed Media on Canvas
Edition: Original Unique Artwork, Hand-Signed by the Artist
Height (inches): 25
Width (inches): 20
Depth (inches): 5/8
Signed by the artist
Signed Area: front
This piece is stretched, with a picture wire on reverse, and ready for display.
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 brings added light, depth and dimensionality to the artwork.
This original mixed media artwork on canvas captures David Bowie, circa 1973, in Bowie’s Aladdin Sane era. Appearing in his first television interview, Bowie was interviewed by zeitgeist celebrity interviewer Russell Harty on the London Weekend Television program Russell Harty Plus Pop. Filmed at South Bank Studios in London, and broadcast on 17 January 1973, the interview spanned broad topics and was the world’s first television introduction to David Bowie, the man who would become an international legend.
After achieving international success as a musician, David Bowie personally commissioned artwork from Sid Maurer, the artist who has painted this Bowie portrait.
With jewel-toned paints contrasting a richly black background, Bowie is portrayed in dramatic splendor, with his signature Aladdin Sane-era chandelier earring. The final image in the auction images shows Bowie during his Russell Harty Plus Pop 1973 television interview.
Measuring 25” in height x 20” width x 5/8" depth, this unique work on canvas comes freshly stretched and ready for display.
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.