"Marilyn Monroe" 2024

Dimensions: 100 x 130 cm

Medium: Spray paint and silkscreen on screen-print panel

Artist: Maximilian Wiedmann

“Marilyn Monroe” (2024) by Maximilian Wiedemann is more than a portrait — it’s a layered act of cultural excavation. From afar, Marilyn appears in her most iconic form: seductive, confident, eternal. But step closer and her very essence begins to unravel. Her image is not painted — it is composed, entirely made up of repeated, silkscreened portraits of John F. Kennedy.

In doing so, Wiedemann doesn’t just reference one of history’s most infamous private entanglements — he builds Monroe from the face of the man who helped immortalize and consume her. The result is a portrait that questions authorship, intimacy, and the legacy of desire. Monroe isn’t merely gazing back at us — she’s constructed from the gaze itself.

Executed in spray paint and silkscreen on screen-print panel, the piece blends the language of street art with the mechanical repetition of Pop, echoing Warhol while subverting its flatness with rich dimensionality. The closer you look, the more the surface destabilizes — just like the myth of Marilyn herself.

Wiedemann’s technical approach is precise, obsessive, and ideologically charged: a woman remembered for being looked at, reassembled from the very figure who defined how we looked at her.