For his latest project, actor James Franco is returning to the role of artist.
This month, Franco opens “Hollywood is Hell” at Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich. The exhibition will debut a never-before-seen series of 28 wall-hanging assemblages and “objets d’art,” as a press release calls them, all created over the past two years. The opening date arrives just weeks after the debut of Hey Joe, the first U.S. release that Franco has starred in since allegations of misconduct forced his career into a hiatus in 2018.
Franco has made numerous artistic efforts over the years. His paintings of the late aughts and early 2010s easily evoke Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 2014, he re-staged Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” for a widely panned show at Pace. He painted $10 portraits for charity in 2016, collaborated by painting clay sewer pipes with his brother in 2017, and staged a multidisciplinary solo exhibition titled “The Dangerous Book Four Boys” at New York’s Clocktower Gallery in 2019, which New York Times critic Roberta Smith called “a confusing mix of the clueless and the halfway promising.”
Now, in “Hollywood is Hell,” Franco appears to channel Robert Rauschenberg—particularly the artist’s noted combines. It’s not Franco’s first exercise in amalgamation, however. His 2011 performance Collage, for instance, layered live acting with video projections. Franco’s career itself is a patchwork of different mediums and businesses—including his new punk-inspired streetwear label, Paly Hollywood.
James Franco, 2 Houses, 1 Castle (2022). Photo: Galerie Gmurzynska.
His artworks slated for Zurich consist of singular, collaged objects that contemplate life in Los Angeles, particularly through the lens of the pandemic. “The streets were empty, the posters damaged on the walls,” Franco recounted in a statement. “I lived at that time near the Hollywood cemetery, where so many stars are buried, and I was walking there. Dreamland had became for me a waste land.”
L.A. icons like helicopters and Disney characters pop up. In He Smelled So Bad (2022), Franco’s scrawl states the work’s titular phrase atop a photograph of a cop car perched ambiguously behind a civilian vehicle. No matter who “he” is to Franco, the piece conjures one of L.A.’s most heart-wrenching calling cards, its immense population of unhoused people.
James Franco, He Smelled So Bad (2022). Photo: Galerie Gmurzynska.
Franco’s recent years have proven bumpy. In 2019, he settled two lawsuits alleging he’d taken advantage of female pupils at his Studio 4 acting school. “Hollywood is Hell,” however, marks Franco’s first art show since he finally admitted to wrongdoing on SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle Show in 2021. In a recent conversation with Variety, the actor discussed how cancellation shaped him. “Being told you’re bad is painful,” he said. “But ultimately that’s kind of what I needed to just stop going the way I was going.”
The collages in “Hollywood is Hell” seem to synthesize Franco’s many disparate components. The bit of Gucci paraphernalia in He Smelled So Bad, for instance, highlights his friendship with the Italian fashion house. Bright colors and gestural accents retain bits of his Basquiat knockoffs. Comic book heroes and readymade lockers evoke the fixation with male youth that defined “The Dangerous Book Four Boys.” The show’s press release noted that “Masculinity is devastated” in this series, “as one of the pillars of a decadent mass entertainment culture.” Perhaps through these constructions of decay, the artist has worked at understanding how, exactly, he became a man who had to change.
James Franco, This is what the World’s Greatest Navy Mom Looks Like (2022). Photo: Galerie Gmurzynska.
Franco even returned to touch up artworks he’d made at age 20 for this show. “Half of the series are therefore like double works: two works in one each time,” the release stated.
“It is really my young actor self being sort of repurposed and put in to the collages,” Franco added.
Gmurzynska has not responded to a request for comment regarding whether Franco’s tumultuous recent past provoked any pause ahead of his show. Additional questions remain. For example, has Franco’s soul searching helped him find his voice? And, will the art world grant him the acclaim he’s long pined after?
“James Franco: Hollywood is Hell” will be at Galerie Gmurzynska, Paradeplatz 2, Zurich, February 17, 2025.