Great names in photography from the last decades such as Chapelle Pierre et Gills, Mary Ellen Mark meet at our next tender on December 15th.
Since its invention in 1839, photography has become a fundamental communication tool for society, but also a key element in the future of fine arts. However, its consideration and value as an artistic practice in its own right has evolved and established itself as photographic techniques and procedures advanced. In this way, while at the beginning the so-called daguerreotype was created as a tool for science, later it was the element that lOnce and for all it freed the pictorial practice of its mimetic function until it became, during postmodernity, the ideal medium to convert any object into a fetish.
The multitude of creative procedures and aesthetic possibilities that photography encompasses shine through in the set of tendered works whose architects are undoubtedly synonymous with international success and prestige. David La Chapelle or Pierre et Gilles achieved fame thanks to their work in the advertising field and the glamorous image they projected around the Star System. By dynamiting the frontiers of commercial art that had enshrined them, they managed to make the leap to galleries, museums and collections around the world until they reached the status of true icons of today’s photography.
On this occasion, La Chapelle moves away from the strident, baroque and artificial aesthetics to which it has accustomed us, to show us its most transcendental and poetic side. Inspired by the biblical story of the universal flood “Awakened” it is made up of 16 photographs in which anonymous people of our contemporaneity (in this case a rocker) take the role of biblical characters. La Chapelle represents here a kind of resurrection after the universal flood where man immersed in purifying water has been rediscovered with universal values and therefore with the path to salvation. In an image similar to that of an embryo floating in the womb, La Chapelle manages to imbue us in a mystical atmosphere whose evocative force refers us to a kind of resurrection of humanity that he reinforces with a studied illumination.
For their part , the iconic photo-paintings of the duo Perre et Gilles are the reflection of the particular universe that the French couple has built by hybridizing religious iconography, gay eroticism and popular culture under a kitche, colorful and excessive aesthetic bathed in an aura of unreality. However, under the apparent frivolity and innocence of his art, the eroticism of his works represents a utopian worldview of his own time where desire and sexuality is the force that makes us all equal.
The art of photography
British photographer Nick Veasy became known on the art scene with his particular creative procedure that he conceives from the use of x-ray images . Through them, Veasy invites us to reflect on our superficial perception of reality. In a metaphor of human superficiality, his “radiographs” emphasize the need to divest ourselves of the world of appearances to see beyond them and get closer to the true essence of things
With a radically different proposal and language Mary Ellen, Mark Nick Brand or Mark Laita explore under a critical eye the challenges and complex realities that the current world always presents us in black and white and with hardly any retouching, prosimio empathizes
The intimacy, empathy and humanity that transcend Mary Ellen’s work made her one of the most recognized photographers of recent times . Along with her famous works in the cinematographic field, Ellen gave us a valuable photographic legacy in which she gave voice and presence to the most disadvantaged groups of society through powerful portraits that impregnate the most stark, strange and delicate reality. In this case, in the work belonging to her celebrated “Twins” series, Ellen immortalized the fascination she felt for the twins whose portraits, far from underlining the evident equality, emphasize and highlight the difference by putting on the table the need for resistance in the face of a world at a time. more uniform and standardized
The ethical and social commitment also underlies the work of Nick Brandt whose subject matter primarily addresses the defense of Africa’s biodiversity . In fact, since he filmed the Michel Jackson video clip in Tanzania, Brand begins an intense production around the African continent showing the world whose passage under an intimate and epic language. In the emotional series “We will inherit dust” Brand, with an implicit critical gaze, confronts us with the degradation to which natural landscapes have been subjected, confronting the before and after of human action.
Mark Laita’s “Created Equal” consists of 105 black and white diptychs through which the American photographer inexorably reflects the social extremes of American society . The dialogue that he establishes between the two opposing images reveals the abysses of North American culture marked by radical economic, ideological and moral differences that are ultimately the result of the history of a people that is based on an absolute polarity.
It is evident that the impact of photography has been one of the most significant for man and his evolution, since alongside its artistic value there is a documentary value as a visual record of our own history. This double intentionality intrinsic to its practice is clearly evident from the set of works being tendered.
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