The Last Cowboy is Dead

The Marlboro Man was invented by the advertising agency Leo Burnett in the 50s to reposition Marlboro as a men's cigarette brand. Men wanted to be him and women wanted to be with him. Some years ago the advertising agency contacted ZEVS for a collaboration on creating a brand new up to date pack of cigarettes. The artist asked himself if he should sell his soul to the Red Devil (Marlboro). He answered (he never answered). The tobacco market is a battlefield and the consumer is the ultimate looser. He prefer to act freely, no brands attached. But still he got an idea.

The Last Cowboy is Dead was the exhibition that began in Berlin during the worldwide lockdown in 2020 and were afterwards held in Mallorca, Copenhagen, Paris and New York. The exhibition is the continuation of the Visual Attacks series which was initiated in 2001. Here he executes the Marlboro Man with a paintball shot on his head, a corpus created by ZEVS on top of the Phillip Morris factory in Berlin. The Marlboro Man is now dead as the millions of people that succumb to cigarette smoking related diseases. The action was documented in a video that was running on several digital platforms for the exhibition.

Artist: ZEVS 
 Client: Aguirre Schwarz