New Release: “Jagger” After Peter Max — Mira Pushes Past the Frame

Juan Mira’s newest painting, Mick Jagger — After Peter Max, is now available through MacDonald Gallery’s eBay store. At 20″×30″, hand-painted in acrylic on canvas, it stands as an incredibly bold and technically demanding addition to Mira’s Peter Max homage series — pushing the physical and structural risks of his canvas work to an entirely new level.

Breaking the Frame

Max’s original Jagger composition was built with its own painted border, a device that framed the figure and held him flat within the picture plane. Mira starts there, faithfully reproducing that border as the visual language Max established — then does something Max’s original never attempted. Jagger’s left arm and elbow, his right shoulder, and his left hand all break forward, pushing out past the border rather than staying contained behind it.

It’s a small structural choice with a big emotional payoff. The border, in Mira’s hands, stops being a boundary and becomes a stage edge — and Jagger doesn’t respect stage edges. The performance spills out past where the picture says it should stop. For a subject built entirely out of kinetic, uncontainable energy, it’s a high-stakes execution where any lapse in dimensional perspective would fall flat. Fortunately, the risk pays off entirely.

Because the painted border does the work of a frame on its own, the piece can hang bare or be framed conventionally in the tradition of Max’s own originals. Either way, it arrives ready to go — fitted with heavy-duty D-ring hangers, wire, and wall pads.

The Anatomy of a Master

Mira’s process has never been about copying Max’s images — it’s about getting inside how Max thinks. Nowhere is that clearer than in Jagger. Max’s studio built these mixed-media portraits by layering acrylic overlays onto a printed photographic base, letting certain areas — a hand, a passage of skin — stay exposed as pure, untouched photograph beneath the paint.

Mira set out to understand that logic well enough to build it from nothing. There is no printed base anywhere in this painting. Every passage Max would have left as raw print — including the exposed hand — Mira constructed by hand, matching the tonal and structural feel of that photographic foundation before layering his own pop overlays on top of it, exactly as Max did on top of his.

While Mira has previously explored the deceptive depth of illusionistic boundaries — such as the painted faux-wood borders found in American Pie — this new portrait raises the stakes by requiring a flawless blend of photographic realism and flat Pop Art overlays from a single, bare canvas.

Hand-Painted, Start to Finish

There is no print, lithograph, or mechanical reproduction anywhere in this piece — a distinction that matters. Every texture, every color passage, every place where the “underlying photograph” seems to show through is acrylic, applied by hand to bare canvas. It’s the same discipline that runs through Mira’s whole body of work: the belief that the emotional arc — the tender, funny, human moment inside a pop icon — only lands if it’s earned brushstroke by brushstroke, not shortcut through a printing press.

The Details

Jagger is an original, one-of-a-kind acrylic painting, hand-painted and signed by Juan Mira. It has been finished with a professional isolation coat and a removable, conservation-grade varnish, allowing for safe cleaning or re-varnishing over the life of the piece. It ships with MacDonald Gallery’s serial-numbered Certificate of Authenticity and is backed by the gallery’s Lifetime Collector Guarantee.

Jagger joins Mira’s ongoing body of work reinterpreting the icons of 20th-century pop art — available now through MacDonald Gallery.

Available: On MacDonald Gallery eBay Store