"Elizabeth Taylor" 2024

Dimensions: 100 x 130 cm

Medium: Spray paint and silkscreen on screen-print panel

Artist: Maximilian Wiedemann

“Elizabeth Taylor” (2024) by Maximilian Wiedemann captures the screen siren not with paint alone, but with memory, and the man who defined so much of hers. From a distance, the piece radiates the cinematic magnetism Elizabeth Taylor embodied. But with proximity, her features dissolve into a repeated pattern: the face of Richard Burton.

Wiedemann uses silkscreen and spray paint not to glorify, but to question. He builds Taylor’s likeness entirely out of Burton's, immortalizing the storm of their love, twice married, twice undone, and never forgotten. The work becomes a recursive loop of obsession and intimacy: she is made of him, just as her public life was inseparable from their passion, excess, and collapse.

The repetition of Burton’s portrait recalls Warhol’s mechanical silk-screening, but Wiedemann applies it with emotional weight rather than irony. The grid becomes a metaphor for dependency, for being seen through the lens of someone else’s presence. It’s tender and quietly tragic.

Technically, the piece is a masterclass in contrast: shimmering metallic texture juxtaposed with soft tonal gradients, blurring the lines between icon and individual, fame and feeling. Wiedemann doesn’t just depict a woman — he exposes what she was built upon.