Two exhibitions
dal 25/2/2004 al 17/4/2004
Segnalato da
25/2/2004
Two exhibitions
Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of Andy Warhol's Late Paintings - primarily the stark black-and-white ad paintings from the mid-1980s. An exhibition of color and black-and-white photographs by Helmut Newton. Among the group of key images are several of his most recent photographs that have never before been exhibited.
Late Paintings
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of Andy Warhol's Late Paintings - primarily the stark black-and-white ad paintings from the mid-1980s.
For this group of works, Warhol returned to his scrapbooks of ads from the 1950s and chose those with hand painted illustrations and lettering. The works - which feature images that have been enlarged and screened on blank white canvases - are both brash and icy. While the images are made by hand, the paintings seem totally blank and disembodied.
In fact, the paintings are so emphatically dry in appearance they seem to suggest that, if pushed any farther, they might simply vanish. In short - to mimic one of the slogans - the paintings are just 'one breath away' from returning to their abstract essence.
Around the same time, Warhol was making his Camouflage paintings - vivid designs that are really about the notion of making things disappear, and his black and white Rorschach works - inky blotches intended to communicate with 'the other world' of our deepest psyche.
The black and white ads and illustrations must be considered in the light of Warhol's impulse, as the year of his death drew near, to fiddle with the beyond as it is transmitted to us through the odd cultural phenomena of the human world.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with a 1985 interview with the artist by Benjamin Buchloh.
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HELMUT NEWTON : Photographs
Feb 26 - Apr 17, 2004
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of color and black-and-white photographs by Helmut Newton. Among the group of key images are several of his most recent photographs that have never before been exhibited.
As a twelve-year old in pre-war Berlin, Newton learned how to use the camera and he loved the night-street romanticism captured by Brassaï, whose photographs were widely published in German magazines. Newton's personality forever epitomized the extreme worldliness, quick wit, and iconoclasm of Berlin. During these years, as he said himself, he was mainly interested in girls and photos - and that didn't change much throughout his dynamic career.
At the age of 18, in 1938, persecution of Jews was mounting in Berlin, and his family decided to flee. China accepted émigrés without quotas, so he packed up and shipped out by himself, only to wind up in Singapore, then Australia. Always a citizen of the world, Newton later left for Europe with his wife, June. There, he found his métier in the world of high fashion photography, where he made his career for over forty years.
In his pictures, designed to make us want what we see, Newton injected a new ultra-sophisticated bravura. His genius lies in his mastery of extreme states of excess and self-absorption. His women seem to demand and get what they want - the perfect shopping attitude. And behind the scorn and sultriness, it's clear that everything is up for sale. The ultimate note of style is in the delight and humor of extreme permissiveness: to be tough, rich, demanding and impossibly sexy - in exactly the right way.
Newton, who died in 2004 at the age of 83, expertly captured the worldly-wise through the sharp, wry eye of his camera. This is the ultimate cool of Newton's world: he was a real lover of life - forever a young guy who loved girls and photos. A classic.
Opening reception: Thursday, February 26th, 6 - 8pm
gagosian
456 NORTH CAMDEN DRIVE
BEVERLY HILLS CA 90210
TEL 310 271 9400
FAX 310 271 9420