Inside Brad Pitt and Nick Cave’s artistic alliance
Thanks to stand-out performances in Legends of the Fall, Se7ven, Seven Years in Tibet, Meet Joe Black and Fight Club, Brad Pitt established himself as one of Hollywood’s finest leading men over the 1990s. After flashing his statuesque abs on screens around the world, it wasn’t long before Pitt became the ultimate heartthrob, romantically entwined in high-profile relationships, first with Jennifer Aniston and later with Angelina Jolie.
Beyond the front-page gloss, Pitt is a true artist, as anyone who has seen his acting can attest. On top of his work on screen, Pitt now likes to devote a healthy portion of his cinematic efforts to film production, a skill that won him an Academy Award. Last year, in a less predictable career digression, Pitt revealed his newfound hobby of sculpture which allowed for an artistic alliance with Nick Cave. For over 30 years, the pair have been close friends since they starred together in Tom DiCillo’s Johnny Suede.
Pitt described the new collection of ceramic sculptures as a “radical inventory of self” upon the initial unveiling at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland.
The sculptures submitted by Pitt and Cave were added to a wider collection by esteemed artist Thomas Houseago, who formed an art collective with the two sprawling A-listers. “For Nick and I, this is a new world and our first entry,” Pitt told Finnish broadcaster Yle at the opening ceremony last September. “It just feels right.”
“To me, it’s about self-reflection. It’s about where I have gotten it wrong in my relationships, where have I misstepped, where am I complicit,” he added. “For me, it was born out of ownership of what I call a radical inventory of self, getting really brutally honest with me and taking account of those I may have hurt, moments I have just gotten wrong.”
Among Pitt’s nine sculptures in the collection is ‘Aiming At You I Saw Me But It Was Too Late This Time’, a moulded plaster panel “depicting a gunfight” between eight people. The panel shows arms, heads, hands and feet emerging from the surface as if it was from underwater. He also boasts a range of house-shaped silicone sculptures that have been shot with a gun using different ammunition gauges. In homage to Houseago, Pitt’s first sculpture was a model house bade of tree bark called ‘House A Go Go’.
Pitt reportedly began making pottery following his divorce from Jolie. Allegedly, he would spend up to 15 hours a day in Houseago’s Los Angeles studio in 2017. It has also been reported that Pitt invited Leonardo DiCaprio to his studio while working on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to “bond over their shared love of pottery,” as a source close to the pair stated at the time. Speaking to GQ in August 2022, Pitt described pottery not as an art but rather a “solo, very quiet, very tactile kind of sport”.
Meanwhile, Cave, who studied painting at the Caulfield Institute of Technology in Melbourne before pursuing music, contributed 17 handpainted ceramic figurines depicting “the life of the Devil in 17 stations.” The sculptures are a nod to Cave’s love of Victorian Staffordshire Flatback figurines, of which he is a keen collector.
Despite being predominantly a sculptor, Houseago contributed a series of Edvard Munch-inspired paintings for his debut exhibition in the Nordic countries. Presumably, he wanted to add artistic variety with Pitt and Cave’s sculptures already in the mix.
See a selection of the sculptures below.
