Featured Events in Zurich in December, 2024 (June Updated)

James Franco is certainly the only Hollywood star to read Marcel Proust on Spiderman films sets. Twice Golden Globe-awarded (2002 for James Dean role; 2018 for The Disaster Artist), Oscar-nominated, the 46 year old actor played in some hundred films and series since he was 16. Actor-director-producer, James Franco has been parallelly acting in life as an academic with a PhD from Yale, a writer publishing poetry, a model for Gucci, and mostly as a visual artist since his teenage years developing a considerable visual work mixing painting, video art and performance. After shows with MOCA Los Angeles (Rebel, 2012, along with artists friends Paul McCarthy, Douglas Gordon, Ed Ruscha…) and in galleries including Pace and Gagosian, Franco presents his new exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich, titled Hollywood is Hell. A powerful series of rough and complex collages composed of various layers of images and signs, symbols and text. 28 shocking canvases and objets d’art appearing as destroyed posters on the street walls of some dirty district will be on display: those collages represent for James Franco “a portrait of Los Angeles during Covid, the artist explains. The streets were empty, the posters damaged on the walls… It was a sort of almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere. I lived at that time near the Hollywood cemetery, where so many stars are buried, and I was walking there. Dreamland had became for me a waste land. And this shit is actually how the dream factory looks like”. One of those collages on canvas is purposely titled: “Hollywood is Hell”. The whole series of works, exhibited for the first time, constitutes a kind of deconstruction of a certain glamorous mythology of Hollywood. Masculinity is devastated – from Bruce Willis’ figure to Batman icon, through Jordan and Travolta – as one of the pillars of a decadent mass entertainment culture. It may come as no surprise that James Franco loves William Burroughs’ literature and his deconstructed writing. Those collages are true deconstructed works. James Franco likes more than everything to walk on the opposite side of the shinning Dream City fantasy. In the highly-standardized Hollywood system, art eventually became a kind of refuge for the actor, the last place of freedom.