Brad Pitt and Nick Cave exhibit together

When actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie became a couple, it was a scandal. Not least because Pitt was still married at the time. When the two separated again later, twelve years, six children and numerous major cinema projects, it caused even more uproar. The boulevard was upside down and the fans couldn’t believe it.

Apparently Brad Pitt felt the same way. After the failed marriage, he licked his wounds where many newly separated people do: to find themselves. This led him to the pottery studio of British artist Thomas Houseago. In those early days, Pitt would sit at the potter’s wheel in Houseago’s Los Angeles studio for up to 15 hours a day, his hands taped, his thoughts organized. He didn’t see what he was doing as art, but only as a “very calm, very tactile sport,” Pitt told GQ Magazine.

Brad Pitt and Nick Cave

Now, however, there is at least one person who classifies Pitt’s sport on the potter’s wheel – and above all that which went beyond that – as art: Thomas Houseago, on whose potter’s wheel Pitt’s development into an artist had started to turn. He invited Pitt to take part in his exhibition «WE» at the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, in south-west Finland.

For Houseago, for its part, had gone through a process of discovery in recent years, albeit explicitly without a focus on the “self”. The foundation of the exhibition, the capitalized “We”, goes back to the result of this very process: “I am not an I, I am a We”, the artist, who has been active for more than three decades, is quoted by the Sara Hildén Museum.

The exhibition is intended to illustrate his departure from an egocentric way of thinking. Because Houseago came to the conclusion that in the creative process all things are connected and that “if nothing is created independently, we must all be connected. Which allows us to overcome all limitations.”

In this way, Houseago overcame the barriers of the various art fields and, in addition to the actor Brad Pitt, also brought the musician Nick Cave on board. Unlike Pitt, however, Cave enjoyed a classical art education. He studied painting at the Caulfield Institute of Technology in Melbourne before embarking on a career as a musician. In addition to music, Cave was also active as a writer. When his second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, was published in 2009, it was being published in thirty different countries at practically the same time.

devils and guns

In the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, a house right by the lake, Houseago’s prominent co-exhibitors, of whom one knew nothing until shortly before the start of the exhibition, are delighted. “In that sense, it’s exciting and wonderful,” chief curator Sarianne Soikkonen told French news agency AFP.

Cave, the man with the black hair and somber songs, contributed a work entitled “The Life of the Devil in 17 Stations”. Ceramic figurines inspired by Victorian Staffordshire Flatback figurines which he collects himself. The flatback figures mostly date from the 18th and 19th centuries, show animals and people in everyday situations and owe their name to the flat backside, which makes them ideal for setting up on chimneys or narrow ledges.

Among other things, Pitt unveiled one of his first works in Finland, which was created in 2017 – shortly after separating from Jolie. It is titled “House A Go Go” and consists of rough pieces of wood and bark that are held together with adhesive tape to form a house, or a home.

Pitt’s plaster sculpture “Aiming At You I Saw Me But It Was Too Late This Time” from 2020 shows, like a painting, the silhouettes of two figures shooting at each other with pistols and their time-lapsed bending backwards.

At the vernissage, Pitt explained that his pieces for the «WE» exhibition were also about the «I»: «For me it’s about self-reflection. It’s about where I’ve gone wrong in my relationships, where I’ve made a misstep, where I’m complicit.” Pitt explained that the art helped him to be “really brutally honest” with himself and to realize that there were moments “where I just did something wrong”.

One of the relationships that Pitt processes in his art is probably that with Jolie. However, the artist did not explain which mistakes he had to admit to himself there. The only thing that remains for the curious is to look at his works of art with a view to finding an answer. Shouldn’t it be the celebrity factor that attracts visitors to the Finnish lakeside museum these days?