The exhibit featured some 50 works by the ‘Rocky’ and ‘Expendables’ star, painted over the past half-century.

“You know, maybe I should have been a painter,” said Sylvester Stallone as he opened the largest-ever restrospective of his paintings. “It sure would have meant a lot less stress.”

The Rocky, Rambo and Expendables star made the trip to Hagen in western Germany for the opening of Sylvester Stallone: The Magic of Being, an exhibition at the Osthaus Museum Hagen.

Stallone has had a few public exhibits of his art in the past, including a 2013 exhibition at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and a 2015 show at the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice, France. But the Hagen show is by far the most comprehensive, tracing Stallone’s entire oeuvre, from the late ’60s until today.

There are strong thematic links between Stallone’s acting and his art. Several of his paintings are Rambo and Rocky themed, exploring his most famous on-screen characters and the impact they have had on popular culture. Rocky, in fact, was a painting before it was a film. In his 1975 work Finding Rocky, Stallone explored the character of an underdog boxer who gets one chance to make it big.