Grand Life in collaboration with Indiewalls and BENT is proud to present Lipsticks and Loose Lips, a show of two new series of paintings by Brian Ermanski, the Prince of Elizabeth Street. The exhibition will run from June 6th – July 2nd in the lobby of the Tribeca Grand Hotel, with an opening reception on June 6th from 9PM-1AM, with an open bar from 9-10 PM co-sponsored by Wodka and Peroni, and featuring DJ sets by DJ Brion Isaacs (Rivington Design House) and DJ David Katz.

No stranger to the world of fashion, Ermanski once approached Karl Lagerfeld about designing a menswear line for Chanel, only to be told that all the money was in cosmetics. Ermanski took Lagerfeld literally, and created Lipsticks, his second pop art series after ICE. With suggestive shapes and a seductive purpose, Lipsticks are unmistakably erotic. You can easily picture The Huffington Post’s “bad boy of the art world” walking up to the most beautiful girl in the room and saying “Nice lipstick! Can I try it on?” before moving in for a kiss. The 16 paintings in acrylic on canvas feature tubes in several shades, which comprise the palette we use to create the illusions we wear every day.

Whereas cosmetics help us conceal the truth, journals are where we let our secrets slip. Loose Lips is drawn directly from the diary of the artist: 32 selected entries documenting radical days spent blasting his boombox on the streets and living on the edge, blown up on archival paper for the world to read. Unlike the highly composed and hard-edged Lipsticks, Loose Lips are scrawled and spur of the moment, a blend of text and images that reveal a side of the artist obscured by the sleek surfaces of his pop paintings. They’re not about the allure of lipstick. They’re about the morning after, when you wake up with your makeup smeared on the bed sheets, stripped bare of illusions – and everything else. The revelation continues with a set of short films that accompany Lipsticks and Loose Lips – a show which starts to answer a question the painter once posed in a print: Who The Fuck Is Brian Ermanski?

Brian Ermanski (b. 1981) has been a familiar figure downtown for over a decade, having painted on the streets of Nolita since moving to New York to attend NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. His work has been featured in Vogue, L’Uomo Vogue, Interview Magazine, and the New York Times; he has been profiled by Crane TV and Plum TV, exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach 2011 at Duncan Quinn, and was the subject of the documentary The Prince of Elizabeth Street, by filmmaker Paul Stone, which premiered at the Los Angeles Short Film Festival in 2010.