The artwork “With all my Love” by Mr. Brainwash goes back just like “Dream Big Dreams” or “Now is the Time” to vintage drawings by Norman Rockwell. The artist is almost unknown in Europe but stands in America for the illustration of the American dream of the 50s and 60s. Even Lana Del Ray has given 2019 her new album the title “Norman Fucking Rockwell!”, after the artist who illustrated the American dream.

Mr. Brainwash lives and loves the American Dream as he does here in the work With all my Love. A native of France, he has since had a phenomenal career. So it is not surprising that he also works this theme into his paintings.

Norman Rockwell’s career began at a young age as an illustrator for “Boy’s Life,” the official magazine of the U.S. Boy Scouts.

Even in his first commissioned works, there was a flourishing patriotism that also characterized his later works for the “Saturday Evening Post”. From 1916 to 1963, he designed the newspaper’s front pages, shaping the imagery of a burgeoning America in the golden age of illustration and consumer culture. In his pictures he showed what he knew and observed: little girls watching their mother do their hair, policemen catching little runaway child vagabonds from their homes and inviting them for a milkshake at first: With all my Love.

In the picture we see a little boy with dungarees, in his hand on his back a brush. Admiring but also proud he looks at his work he has just brushed on the wall. The love and joy of work but also to life are central theme of this motif. Do something with love – With all my Love – is applicable to many things. As always with Mr. Brainwash is next to the central main motif that is sprayed as a stencil stencil, the background is variably designed as mixed media. With acrylic paint, collages, stencils and other iconic pop art characters such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat or Andy Warhol.

For over 47 years, Rockwell depicted everyday life in small-town America on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. He went down in art history with many works, for example “The Problem We All Live With” an iconographic work of the civil rights movement.

But his earlier, less political works are also art historical relics, as they paint an idealized self-image of America. The most impressive illustration of this is probably “Saying Grace,” the most expensive Rockwell painting ever sold at auction, at $46 million.

International Shooting Star / Mr. Brainwash

Hardly any other street art artist has experienced such a rapid rise as the Frenchman Thierry Guetta aka Mr. Brainwash (미스터 브레인워시), born in Garges-lès-Gonesse in 1966. His path to becoming the most successful artist of recent years is closely linked to the name Banksy and his Oscar-winning film Exit Through the Gift Shop: In this documentary Banksy encourages the then still unknown Guetta to become active as an artist himself under the pseudonym Mr. Brainwash. The rumor persists that the Frenchman Brainwash is a purely fictional person invented by Banksy and that his works are actually created by Banksy.

Like many Urban Art and Street Art artists, Mr. Brainwash uses well-known motifs like celebrities or comic icons and combines them with his very own signature messages of positivity: “Love is the Answer”, “Life is Beautiful” or “Follow Your Dreams”. The main motif is sprayed as a stencil with acrylic paint, whereas the background is composed differently as a collage or with mixed media. Old snippets from comic books, vintage brochures and other stencils let the viewer discover new details again and again.