At Home
At Home
YVON LAMBERT NEW YORK is pleased to announce the exhibition, At
Home, a selection of works chosen and installed by Mario Testino, as well as a series of new works by
Idris Khan specially commissioned by Testino for this show. The exhibition opens Tuesday, July 10th
and runs through Tuesday, August 21st, 2007. The gallery will be open Monday through Friday, 10
am to 6 pm. The gallery will be closed Wednesday, August 1st through Wednesday, August 15th.
Mario Testino, best known as a fashion photographer, is also a respected art collector, art collaborator
and tastemaker. He began collecting contemporary art in the early ‘90s, and from the beginning was
interested in seeking out the new. He has also participated on collaborations with the likes of Jim Lambie,
Angus Fairhurst, Karen Kilimnik, Ugo Rondinone and Nigel Cooke.
At Home will not only showcase the talents of artists such as John Stezaker, Glenn Ligon, Anne Collier,
Wolfgang Tillmans, Nicola Tyson, and Anselm Reyle, as chosen by someone with a unique
understanding of imagery, but will be a special installation by Mario Testino focusing not merely on art as
something to look at, but how we look at it—and, moreover, how we live with it. It is an examination, both
playful and serious, of paintings as decoration, as well as works of art, valued for their form and color as
much as their content and authorship. Testino will transform the gallery into his ideal showcase: not a
blank space where a painting becomes a fetishized object away from the context of everyday life, but a
drawing room in which each painting has to survive and flourish as part of a rich community, allowing us
to examine how works of art inform each other and their surroundings as well as ourselves.
Mario Testino is a photographer who has built his career on discovery and transformation, constantly
redefining the boundaries of commercial photography. His Gucci campaign in the mid-1990s heralded a
sea change in fashion in the broadest sense, instantly ending the international trend for grunge, and
inspiring a new celebration of luxury and sexuality. Likewise his portraits of Princess Diana, both intimate
and instantly iconic, redefined our collective notions of a Princess. In 2002 his work was the subject of a
solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London (it has since traveled around the world), which
attracted more visitors to the museum than any other in its history.
Idris Khan’s work is an enigmatic play of appropriation and re-creation.
Combining analog and digital
photographic techniques, his works possess characteristics more akin to drawing or painting, animated by
the accumulative intervention of the artist’s hand. For At Home Khan will use photographs taken by Mario
Testino of artists’ studios, of Testino at work, and of architectural spaces and interiors. Staying away from
the fashion photography Testino is known for, Khan has delved into more personal snapshots, picking up
on images that have never been seen in magazines or books, to create three dark and haunting images
that highlight photography’s own melancholic existence as a medium, one that at times collects
disregarded memories.
Idris Khan was born in Birmingham, England in 1978 and now lives and works in London. He received
his MA in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in 2004 and has since been included in major group shows
‘Contemporary Photography and the archive’ at SFMOMA and the traveling group show ‘Regeneration 50
Photographers of Tomorrow’ organized by the Musée de l’Elysee in Switzerland. Solo exhibitions include
shows at Victoria Miro Gallery in London (2006) and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (2006). He will
present solo exhibitions at Yvon Lambert New York this October and at Magasin 3, Stockholm in 2008.
Yvon Lambert - New location
550 West 21st Street - New York
Free admission