One of the icon of the pop culture died on 17th of November of this year, Guy Peellaert achieved fame as an artist who embraced the attitudes and methods of the Pop Art movement, surrealism and psychedelia. He created iconic images of rock’n’roll stars of the 1960s and 1970s, most famously David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. His art was exhibited in Paris, New York, London, Tokyo, Cuba, Brazil and Italy.
Peellaert made his name with Rock Dreams (1973), a collaboration with the English rock writer Nik Cohn. The book meditated on the obsessions and mythologies of rock’n’roll.
Peellaert used a mix of photography, paint and drawing manipulated into collages to accompany the surreal text. He placed some of the generation’s biggest icons, from Elvis to Bob Dylan, in fantastical, bizarre, intimate and often scandalous situations : a pink satin-tinged Jim Morrison squatting in his bath, the Rolling Stones dressed in Nazi uniforms surrounded by young girls, the Beatles having tea with the Queen ... Rock Dreams sold more than a million copies worldwide.
Peellaert’s work was in vogue. He was called upon to design album covers for stars across the globe: the Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock ’N Roll album and David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs LP, which depicted the musician as a grotesque mix of man and dog with genitalia that were quickly airbrushed when the record was first distributed in 1974. His reputation rapidly flourished in the US as he was commissioned, on the back of his success, to design posters for some of the biggest cult films of the 1970s including Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, starring Robert De Niro, as well as Wim Wenders’s The Wings of Desire (1987) and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993).
http://www.guypeellaert.com
