Sylvester Stallone

Sylvester Stallone is best known for writing and starring in the blockbuster movie franchise Rocky. He has recently started showing the paintings he’s made over the past 50 years. Stallone’s work has evolved over the decades, with later canvases veering towards abstract forms and a reduced color palette of black, white, and red. Stallone cites the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francis Bacon, and Kasimir Malevich as his key influences, as well as Andy Warhol, for whom he famously posed in a series of photographic portraits in the 1980s. A prolific screenwriter, he often used art to help conceptualize his characters; including his 1970s painting Finding Rocky served as a means of entry into his character’s mindset. Stallone’s works have been featured in retrospective museum exhibitions in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Nice, France.