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Thursday, January 8, 2009

Selfportrait 1985

In 1984-1985, the movie career of Marisa Mell was slowly coming to an end. She was desperate for money and earning a living so she could rent a little apartment and have food on the table. Hardship was always around the corner. Her often last resort nude photography was also drying up so she had to look for other means of income! One of those means, next to singing or writing her autobiography "Coverlove", was to start painting, which she did with reasonable success.

In 1985 she made her only selfportrait. During the exhibition of her work in her home town of Graz, she told the audience there that the general public sees her only as a sex-symbol with a face, hair, lips and breasts. Therefore this painting has its focus on these four features.

The painting is an original drawn on card board with chalk, oil chalk and coal. The picture is 60 x 80 cm. She has signed the picture with her name "Marisa Mell" and the year "85" in her characteristic signature. The picture was sold last year for 2.000 euros in Austria by its original buyer who had it bought at an exhibition from Marisa Mell in 1989 held at the Grazer Hauptpost.

4 comments:

Keith said...

Hey Mirko. That was a cool post. I never had any idea about this aspect of her career. How long did she do these? I guess you've got to earn money how you can. Cheers!

Mirko di Wallenberg said...

Hi Keith, there is little known about this aspect of her career. I believe that it was a short lived artistic art career, just like her autobiography and singing meaning going nowhere, so after a while she put all her hopes again on an acting career by finding a producer to make a film together with her. She found after a while a good script based on a novel that would give her a great leading part but her illness stopped everything. In the future I will make this an item on the blog. Greetings Mirko.

Anonymous said...

As far as I know, there was only one (very unsuccessful) exhibition of her drawings and paintings in Graz in 1989. (She lied about this in her autobiography, of course, claiming her exhibitions "in Austria and Germany were highly successful".)

Thank you for posting this. I think the picture is awesome!

Mirko di Wallenberg said...

Thanks for clarifying that on one of her more mysterious periods of her life!