Presented at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City, ‘Face to Face: Portraits of Artists’ has collated more than 50 photographs by Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie, alongside two films by Tacita Dean, each orbiting around cultural figures, presented through portraiture. 

Showing from 27 January to 1 May 2023, the images focus on creatives in their element – on film shoots, in studios and in more tranquil moments – in a dedicated series that brings together archival material from each artist and includes video portraits from rarely filmed artists such as Louise Bourgeois and David Hockney.

ICP New York’s ‘Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie‘

LA-based writer and curator Helen Molesworth worked on the ICP show, which places the connections created by the images at the forefront. ‘I see all three artists involved in making pictures that are not only in dialogue with their given subjects, but also with the history of the genre of portraiture and the medium of photography,’ says Molesworth.

‘These pictures and films offer us formality and intimacy, patience and curiosity, and the thrill of an unguarded moment.’ This intimacy is captured by Lacombe, Opie and Dean in an array of settings, and exposes the public to decades of documentation. 

Brigitte Lacombe’s long-term project of shooting on Martin Scorsese’s film sets shows the American director’s evolving practice and the changes in his works over time. Her contribution also includes portraits of Maya Angelou, Joan Didion and Glenn Ligon (the last from a series of Hauser & Wirth New York artists photographed by Lacombe for Wallpaper*). 

Catherine Opie is known for her early portraits of members of the LGBTQ community, using the medium as a tool to subvert queer stereotypes, as well as her dedicated artist portraits. Here, her subjects span Thelma Golden, Lawrence Weiner, Rick Owens, and David Hockney.

Berlin- and LA-based Tacita Dean’s moving image works have captured artists such as Cy Twombly and Mario Merz in solitary moments. Featured in ‘Face to Face’ are two films, Portraits (2016), focusing on David Hockney in his Los Angeles studio, and One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting (2021), comprising a conversation between artists Luchita Hurtado and Julie Mehretu. 

Dean records creatives paused in thought and, as described by Molesworth, ‘each of these artists has engaged portraiture – a genre of image-making as old as modernity itself – as a means of connecting themselves to other artists. The results are three bodies of work that play with the historical conventions of the genre while nibbling away at its edges.’

‘Face to Face: Portraits of Artists by Tacita Dean, Brigitte Lacombe and Catherine Opie’, 27 January – 1 May 2023 at the International Center of Photography, 79 Essex Street, New York, NY 10002. icp.org

Few photographers have seen more through their lenses than Inez & Vinoodh. The duo’s distinctive, experimental practice has made them one of the most sought-after practitioners in the industry – operating, as Inez puts it, as ‘two brains, one person’. 

Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin met at the Fashion Academy in their hometown of Amsterdam, where they both studied fashion design. When Vinoodh commissioned Inez to shoot his first fashion collection in 1986, they realised the potential of their partnership, in work and life. ‘We both grew up in the same city, and have the same influences,’ they say via Zoom from their New York studio. ‘We did that first shoot together and we didn’t even need to talk, we just had the same feelings about everything.’

Their path has seamlessly alternated between fashion photography and high-concept fine art, while their practice is grounded in contradictions: exquisite meets freakish; mundane meets surreal; glamorous meets grotesque. Through a deft command of digital manipulation tools, their images have upended gender roles, subverted societal notions of physical perfection, and lured viewers in with a taste of the sumptuous, only to dash expectations with something altogether more unearthly. ‘Each day is as exciting as it was 30 years ago,’ they say. ‘It’s this idea of reinventing everything all the time. We don’t rely on a formula, and we don’t really get bored.’

The duo have created major campaigns for the likes of Chanel, Valentino, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, staged art exhibitions at the Stedelijk, the Hayward and the Whitney, designed a jewellery collection, directed music videos, collaborated on a long-term basis with Lady Gaga and Björk, and conceived online platform Double Dutch, a charitable initiative that rethinks cash gifting with the help of leading contemporary artists. 

Their portrait repertoire reads as its own eclectic hall of fame, from Barack Obama, A$AP Rocky, Sophia Loren, Tilda Swinton and Kendall Jenner to fellow judge Julianne Moore, whom the duo photographed for this issue. ‘You get to meet some incredibly talented people like Julianne and build a relationship and trust. There’s always this idea of surrendering and sort of letting it go from their side. It’s something very special and not to be taken lightly.’

The dawn of computer-age image-making was pivotal for the duo. While photography had largely been siloed as a way to document reality, the digital revolution ushered in a new age of potential, and Inez & Vinoodh were at the forefront. In 1991, they were introduced to the Quantel Paintbox (a pre-Photoshop editing system), which allowed them to ‘subvert the decisive moment’, ‘mess with the concept of time’ in their images, and tear through the very fabric of reality. It’s easy now, in a world defined by digital manipulation, to forget just how radical their explorations were. ‘Sometimes it’s about disrupting this idea of perfection,’ they explain. ‘There are mistakes that happen while we’re doing something on the computer, and then that becomes the basis for a series.’ But they also have a penchant for the analogue, revelling in the unpredictability of physical image- making through collage. ‘We like a certain feeling of a hand in there rather than ultimate perfection,’ they say.

For both, their Dutch upbringing remains embedded in their practice; from the Rembrandts and Van Goghs they saw in Amsterdam museums and the Rietveld furniture that furnished their schools, shops and public buildings to the creative melting pot of art school. ‘Study as long as you can, because it’s really the time when you build your vocabulary,’ they say. They draw parallels with the two-dimensionality and use of light in Dutch old master paintings. ‘We’re very frontal. That’s quite a Dutch thing. When there’s no light on the person we’re photographing, it’s not a picture.’

For Designer of the Year, they singled out nominee Studiopepe. ‘Some of their designs remind us of the sort of simplicity and functionality that turns into an unexpected shape,’ the duo say. ‘When you grow up, you don’t think much about the furniture around you. You just use it. It’s interesting that the things that remind you of your childhood come back as these design objects that, in our case, end up in our home.’

Home, for Inez & Vinoodh, is an apartment in Manhattan and a house in the Hamptons, which Inez describes as bohemian with Japanese influences and a very specific colour scheme. ‘We want it to look as if we started living here in the 1970s and just kept collecting art, objects, furniture and trinkets all along.’ Inez admits that she is ‘obsessed with outdoor table lighting’ and ‘would love to collaborate with a great brand or design the interiors for a hotel’.

Inez & Vinoodh have condensed double Dutch into a single, inimitable idea, with an instinctive feel for who is in front of them, and what to do with them. ‘A big part of our life is meeting the most incredible people, then meeting them through the lens,’ they say. It’s a privilege.’ 

inezandvinoodh.com

The city of Minneapolis may have unwittingly been at the heart of the racial uprisings that swept across the United States in 2020, but an exhibition of photographs at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) the same year proved that the city is also leading the charge on other aspects of social change.

The exhibition, ‘Vision 2020: Jess T Dugan’, presented a series of large-scale portraits of transgender and gender-expansive older adults by the photographer Dugan, who had been working on a book specialising on the subject matter since 2013. The book, To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Older Adults, features interviews with and portraits of 65 sitters in their homes or personal spaces across the country. A joint effort between Dugan and her spouse, Vanessa Fabbre, a social worker and assistant professor at Washington University in St Louis, the pioneering tome elegantly articulates the triumphs and struggles to be found in each subject’s journey and experience (and is currently sold out).

‘We knew there was a lack of representation of transgender people in general – especially transgender older adults – and we wanted to fill that gap,’ Dugan shares. ‘We had heard from younger transgender people that they had never seen images of transgender older adults and they lacked a roadmap for what their life might look like as they aged. Simultaneously, we were aware that, in many cases, transgender older adults were directly responsible for the progress around gender and sexuality that we benefit from today. We wanted to record and preserve that history before it was too late.’

Dugan and Fabbre had one simple criterion when it came to looking for their subjects. ‘The only requirement for participation was that the participants self-identified as transgender or gender-expansive and were over the age of 50,’ says Dugan. ‘Beyond that, we were committed to including a diverse array of people and intentionally sought out subjects whose lived experiences exist within the complex intersections of gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and geographic location.’

The beautifully varied body of work, which showcases individuals in their homes, places of work or parks, accompanied by partners or cherished objects, dressed normally or to the nines, is a quiet, yet powerful celebration of the challenges the LGBTQ+ community has been overcoming for years. With a subject in her nineties also included, the book is a powerful testament to how long and complex the LGBTQ+ movement is.

At MIA, ‘Vision 2020’ comprised eight portraits – seven of which were promised gifts to the collection and the eighth, a portrait of Minneapolis council member and political activist Andrea Jenkins, was donated by Dugan and the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago. The exhibition was curated by Casey Riley, the institute’s head of the Department of Photography and New Media.

‘Exhibiting this work in Minneapolis is especially meaningful to me and Vanessa, following George Floyd’s death,’ Dugan said at the time. ‘Many of the participants, such as Andrea Jenkins, are trans people of colour whose courage and hard work demonstrate the power of activism to affect social change.’

Dugan’s body of work also exists as a limited-edition portfolio that’s been designed for university and teaching museums’ use. The full interview transcripts have also been donated to a variety of archives.

‘My work does not attempt to provide definitive answers; rather, it invites viewers to engage with others in an intimate, meaningful way, requiring them to reflect on their own identities in the process,’ Dugan concludes. ‘I hope that my photographs both validate those within queer communities and educate those who are not LGBTQ or who may be unfamiliar with LGBTQ people.’

INFORMATION

tosurviveonthisshore.com

jessdugan.com

new.artsmia.org

Multidisciplinary artist Chris Levine is known for the sort of technical art wizardry that leaves jaws dropped, minds boggled and eyes dazzled. During a career spanning photography, installation, design, music and fashion, he’s collaborated with the likes of Grace Jones and Massive Attack and captured the likeness of everyone from Kate Moss to the Dalai Lama in his distinctive lightbox format.

But he’s perhaps best known for one of the most astonishing portraits of Queen Elizabeth II ever made, commissioned to mark Jersey’s 800-year of allegiance to the Crown in 2004. More recognisable still is an image that emerged from an outtake from said commission. Lightness of Being captured the monarch with her eyes closed as she rested between shots. The resulting hologram is meditative, ethereal and hyper-contemporary, and in the long and fruitful history of Royal portraiture, is entirely remarkable. 

Wallpaper*: When you were first commissioned to photograph the Queen by the Jersey Heritage Trust, what was your response? 

Chris Levine: I got a call out of the blue and honestly thought it was a friend pulling my leg. I’d shot rock stars and been asked to record Indian gurus but the Queen seemed far fetched. It was only when I was summoned to a meeting at the National Portrait Gallery with [former director] Charles Saumarez Smith and the Jersey Heritage Trust that it all became very real. 

The portrait commission was to mark 800 years since the island of Jersey broke away from France and pledged allegiance to the Crown. It turns out I was the wild card in a shortlist of well-known artists put forward to Jersey by the artist Gordon Young, who was appointed to curate the historic commission.

W* How much time did you have to prepare, and how did you prepare?

CL: A date was set in the diary giving me some two years to prepare for the shoot. I had a lot of time to process the conceptual development and what I wanted to achieve. I considered a number of different light-based approaches from LED screen, electroluminescent film, different forms of holograms and laser etching in crystal. 

I envisaged that there would be a lot of input from the Palace and commissioning body as to what needed to be conveyed in the work. I thought there would be a need for props and visual elements of suggestion, for instance, the three leopards of Jersey, or Mont Orgueil in the background. As it happened it was all left entirely to me including what Her Majesty wore. A week before the shoot I got a call from Angela Kelly [the Queen’s personal assistant and senior dresser] to ask what I’d like Her Majesty to wear. I got to style my subject, which involved going through a selection of clothes and selecting the Diadem from the Crown Jewels. 

W*: Do you remember how you felt on that day in Buckingham Palace? 

CL: We had three days in the Yellow Drawing Room to set up the equipment. I had been quite blasé about the shoot until the day of the sitting and became very nervous. We had just one sitting and we had to get it in the can. There was a lot that could go wrong and we were convinced there was some kind of electronic interference in the room that was messing with our electronics. George Bush was staying at the Palace and we wondered if there was some surveillance technology causing the interference. Luckily it resolved itself just before the Queen arrived. She was wearing the dress I’d been holding up two days previously when I told Angela I think this is the one. That was a surreal moment.

W* What did the technical side of the commission involve? 

CL: Much of my work is collaborative on a technical level. I can look at what my visual and artistic objectives are and select the best people to execute my vision. I’d worked on a lot of hologram designs and a handful of pulsed laser portraits with Rob Munday and Jeff Robb and chose them as my technical team and the camera was custom-built by them. In the end, I worked with Dr John Perry in the US to make the final large-format holographic stereogram that was unveiled by Prince Charles at the Jersey Museum. 

W*: Lightness of Being, depicting the Queen with her eyes closed, was made years later based on an outtake from the Equanimity portraits. How did this come about, and why do you think it still resonates?

CL: To shoot [in] 3D we used a digital camera that moved along a linear track in front of the Queen. I had a normal still camera positioned at the centre of the track to shoot reference images from the central position of the track. Because I also recorded 3D data scans of Ma’am, one of my potential post-production directions was to texture-map a photo from the reference camera onto the computer model. 

There was a lot of light on Ma’am while we were shooting and each pass of the moving camera took a while to reposition and recalibrate. I was concerned that it was uncomfortable between passes and suggested to Ma’am that she rested between shots. She closed her eyes and we captured the moment. Some years later, I was reviewing the outtakes from the sittings and came across the shot and was blown away. I immediately put a filter on it and the piece was made. It’s as if I channelled it. The only tweak I made to it was to the colour of the lipstick and I gave it a contemporary spin.

I think that with the eyes closed it somehow takes the viewer into a spiritual realm and from there it touches people. It goes beyond the physical and conveys a sense of lightness, of being. The title came to me in meditation. Mario Testino told me it was the most beautiful image of the Queen he’d ever seen and inspired me to show it to the world. My exhibition ‘Lightness of Being’ was in 2008 and the rest was history. The NPG said it was the most evocative image of a royal by any artist.

Information

chrislevine.com

Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey is hot off the back of Desert X in Palm Springs, where he staged a sculptural installation comprising yellow plastic jerry cans, used to transport water in Ghana. Now, he is presenting a new body of work in ‘Beyond Skin’, a solo show currently on view at Simchowitz Gallery, Los Angeles. The exhibition brings together ideas of image-making and identity construction – themes that Clottey has long explored. 

Inspired by mid-century black and white photography originating from the coast of West Africa, Clottey’s works update the visual language of historical images and transports them into the present day.

Working with a wide array of materials, including duct tape, cork and collages made from posters in dressmaking shops, Clottey combines a dynamic energy with a variety of cultural influences. ‘The conversation starts with our histories and how we [Africans] have evolved in terms of how we present ourselves,’ explains Clottey. ‘I won’t say I’m juxtaposing the classical with the unexpected, but I’m throwing light on the evolution of image-making; who makes the image, and where are these images shown.’

Another memorable aspect of the portrait-based series is the use of fashion as a facet of identity. Vibrantly detailed and demonstrating a bold choice of colours that intentionally subvert conventional notions of gender and sexuality, Clottey’s subjects collectively celebrate individuality, while rebelling against antiquated notions of personhood.

‘I’m interested in finding everyday materials and using them in unconventional ways,’ says Clottey, who was a fashion model for a time. ‘The exploration of these materials sometimes gives them a whole different meaning and also starts conversations on the alternative uses of the material that people may not have thought of. I won’t say they are unexpected materials but rather, they help me create unexpected artworks.’

He continues, ‘I’m always looking at how materials can significantly influence a work, and how it fits in the ideas I explore to create a shared understanding. I’ve always been inspired by alternative fashion and styling; one that is created by the individuals who wear them, and the media they use in sharing these creations. So instead of using paint to design the dresses of the characters, I use a material, [like duct tape] that will let me cut and join materials like the designers, tailors and seamstresses do in their shops and fashion houses.’

The result is an uplifting array of work that recognises the past while reframing it for the present. Duct tape, a crude and at times violent tool, has been reclaimed as a symbol of strength and protection when tracing the body of Clottey’s subjects. His use of cork as a canvas also alludes to the use of notice boards back in his hometown as a means of communication and conveyance.

Steeped in meaning, while still charged with visual energy, the works invite viewers to delve beneath the surface.

INFORMATION

Serge Attukwei Clottey, ‘Beyond Skin’, until 8 May, 2021, Simchowitz Gallery. simchowitz.com

ADDRESS

8255 Beverly Blvd
Los Angeles CA 90048

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Bus stops across Brooklyn will give space to art this month, displaying a series of portraits that champion local women. ‘Black women you are essential, we love you, we see you’ is artist Aya Brown’s love letter honouring the Black and brown female essential workers who have kept New York City going during the pandemic.

Drawn on brown craft paper, using Prismacolour pencils, Brown’s portraits render her subjects - beauty store workers, nurses, caretakers - with undeniable poise and grace. Though many of the women are illustrated wearing their uniforms, small details reveal their unique personal style and finesse. Gold earrings, ripped jeans, flawless braids, a Sesame Street printed top.

Her choice of canvas is intentional. ‘I use brown paper because the art school standard, or when you buy paper to put in your printer, when you sign a contract, when you look at your email - everything begins on white’ she says. ‘For me, when I’m drawing these Black women, I don’t want them to come from whiteness. Things do not need to start from white, this brown paper, this colour that looks like our skin, is totally valid.’

Brown began the series back in early 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic. Wanting to go further than the 7pm clapping ritual, the Flatbush-based artist started to document these women who she felt were unseen and under-appreciated, yet who were risking their lives each day to keep life moving for all of us. She published the portraits to her Instagram, accompanied by the stories of the women featured.

Brown’s close friend Keyanna, an EMT who drives an ambulance truck, is depicted, as is Brittney, another friend who works as an OB/GYN Sonographer at a local hospital. Both women will travel past the portraits on their way to work.

‘Brittney she lives around the corner from me and she drives past it everyday. Now all of her neighbours are saying ‘Yo Brittney!’ She’s now getting that acknowledgement, she does incredible work for women and mothers.’

Locations were chosen to amplify the women and their roles within their communities. Keasha and Ieesha work in public housing at the Kingsborough housing projects in Brookyln’s Crown Heights, where their portrait is now on display. ‘I tried to put that portrait as close as possible to them so they could see it and so that people in their neighbourhood could see it. So they can see these women who maintain the area’ she says.

Accessibility is important to Brown, who previously worked in a gallery, and has displayed works on the facade of the Brooklyn Public Library, on subway kiosks and even outside her own apartment. Showing across nine bus stops on the MTA transit network in Brooklyn, this exhibition has been produced in collaboration with Virgil Abloh’s Public Domain project.

‘I think public spaces are super powerful. Public space is everyone’s space. The gallery space can be very exclusive’ she says. ‘These works are not supposed to be in a gallery, unless it’s an institution that’s accessible to my community. I chose the bus stops specifically because during my entire childhood I took the bus.’

The essential workers series is ongoing, portraying women Brown knows personally, along with women she has met in daily life, and some she has not yet encountered. ‘These are all genuine moments of just me being inspired.’

Some of the portraits have been drawn through sittings, others through photographs that have been sent to her. Commissions have also come from far and wide, with essential workers asking her to draw them.

‘Black women have this sisterhood, this line that’s unspoken. I’m showing these women that I love them – and it makes me happy that they get to see it.’

INFORMATION

Aya Brown’s portraits will be on view on bus stops throughout Brooklyn until 14 March, 2021

public---domain.com/aya-brown/

ayabrown.com

Capturing art-world and creative figures at home in their living room, at their desks and by their windows, British photographer Joanna Vestey’s portraits are a marker of our strange times. Wearing their masks, her subjects, including Grayson Perry, Jenny Saville and Camille Walala, have been photographed as part of a series to raise money for art therapy charity, AT The Bus.

Before the most recent UK restrictions, Oxfordshire-born Vestey travelled across the country to document life under lockdown. Relying only on her tripod, camera and a stool, Vestey shot her subjects using only natural light, creating portraits that are remarkable in their intimacy.

The masked portraits are now on sale as limited-edition prints in an auction that aims to raise £150,000 for the art therapy programme delivered by AT The Bus.

Based inside a double-decker bus with custom-built studio spaces, the programme runs creative sessions for young people aged 7 to 18 during term time. The bus, whose exterior was designed by Walala, takes up residence in school grounds across Oxfordshire and London throughout the year, providing a safe space for students to attend classes where they learn to create and transform objects.

With young people’s mental health being heavily impacted by the pandemic, the opportunities offered by the programme are more vital than ever.

‘AT The Bus helps children rediscover their habits of creativity,’ says Saville, a patron of the charity. ‘The process of being utterly present in the moment, where all your concentration is given to a particular creative task – it’s when humans play their best game, can love life, and themselves.’

Alongside Saville, Perry and Walala, the impressive line-up of portraits includes Joy Labinjo, Zandra Rhodes, Richard Wentworth, Fiona Banner, Philippa Perry, Dawn French and Cornelia Parker.

Each limited-edition print is signed and is part of a run of only 50, costing £150 per print and available to purchase at atthebus.org.uk. The funds raised from the project will enable AT The Bus to deliver 5,000 hours of art as therapy.

INFORMATION

See the full limited edition portrait series at atthebus.org.uk

Like so many entrepreneurs and business owners this year, the contemporary art advisor and former journalist Adora Mba had to place plans to open her contemporary art gallery in Accra, Ghana on hold. Mba’s ADA \ Contemporary originally intended to stage its first show, by Collins Obijiaku, in March, but it opened six months later. The delay allowed Mba to refine her strategy and strengthen relationships with the artists she represents.

Committed to nurturing Ghana’s emerging art scene, ADA \ Contemporary’s second show, the debut of the self-taught Nigerian painter Eniwaye Oluwaseyi, titled ‘The Politics of Shared Spaces’, presents an exciting body of work that contemplates the identities, narratives and power struggles formed within the layered frameworks that accompany the shared space. Explored through a portfolio of 12 large-scale canvases, the exhibition investigates the contexts of shared living spaces, communities and mindsets, while offering a commentary on the politics of race and class.

‘I see portraiture as a means to impart a social commentary,’ explains the 26-year-old Oluwaseyi, who only began pursuing art a year and a half ago. ‘Each work brings attention to an individual of a certain socioeconomic background and outlines underlying political issues by shedding a light on a marginalised person or community, all-the-while examining the identities and power struggles within our shared spaces. With my work, I hope to spark up comprehensive conversations with those that see them, no matter where on the globe they may find themselves.’

He continues, ‘I focus primarily on the dynamics of power struggles: from sharing my viewpoint on the #EndSARS protests currently happening in Nigeria, to bringing people's attention to the Albino communities in Sub-Saharan Africa, who have been caught in the crossfire of ignorance and Black colourism [and killed as a result].’ 

Each of Oluwaseyi’s portraits captures its subjects within a vacuum of ambiguity, inviting the viewer to reconsider what is being prioritised in the visual space. Using a vivid colour palette and intentional compositions, Oluwaseyi also asserts the idea of co-existence by presenting his subjects in a non-dominant manner. Working in oil on canvas, his intricate brushstrokes convey both a refinement and vulnerability to the subjects being portrayed.

‘I try to combine unusual colour palettes to go beyond the borders of religion, race and tradition,’ he explains. ‘I use colour as a means to communicate the subject matter since skin colour is rooted in my work, but [also] as a medium for creation and expression. Colours are reflections of my moods and feelings while I paint each piece. I purposefully choose vibrant colours to embody the term "person of colour,” in an aspiration to emphasise that we, as Blacks and Africans, are likewise majestic people.’ 

Eniwaye concludes, ‘I believe that if we are able to coexist in a communal space, no reason will arise to ostracise some or harm others whom we may not “understand”. Within our personal spaces, we can seek to work together at peace without placing priority over anyone in the face of their identity, race or position. If this can be achieved, then we can project these same ideals onto our communities as a whole.’ 

INFORMATION

Eniwaye Oluwaseyi, ’The Politics of Shared Spaces’, until 27 December, ADA \ contemporary art gallery, Accra. ada-accra.com

ADDRESS

ADA \ contemporary art gallery
Ground Floor, ALTO Tower
Villaggio Vista
North Airport Road
Accra, Ghana

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In St. Louis, Missouri, a new exhibition is rethinking the definition of contemporary photography. ‘Just Pictures’ surveys a new age of genre-bending photographers whose work oscillates between contexts and disciplines of fine art, fashion photography, and the history of the medium. 

The exhibition is conceived and curated by critic and author Antwaun Sargent, and held at projects+gallery. Sargent is perhaps best known for his highly-lauded book, The New Black Vanguard, a critical, and strikingly visual anthology exploring how a new generation of young Black photographers are eradicating the parameters of art and fashion. 

Along similar lines, ‘Just Pictures’ seeks to disrupt the conventional constraints of photography, in favour of a non-prescriptive approach where formal definitions are defunct and approaches are fluid. The resulting images could feel equally at home on the pages of glossy magazines, social media feeds, on museum walls or in domestic spaces. ‘Central to these images is the collaborative complicity of the image maker and their subjects but also the seemingly disparate histories of photography, from landscape and vernacular to portraiture and fashion,’ Sargent explains. 

The featured artists are Ruth Ossai, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Yagazie Emezi, Mous Lamrabat, Renell Medrano, Rafael Pavarotti, Joshua Kissi, Justin Solomon and Joshua Woods. Ruth Ossai uses fashion as a tool to transport narratives that explore and celebrate her personal history and the broader cultural identity of her subjects. Renell Medrano casts new light on street and documentary photography, with images imbued with glamour and rich symbolism.

New York-based Medrano – whose recent photographic subjects have included the likes of Jay-Z and Solange – has a practice firmly rooted in her parents’ birthplace of the Dominican Republic, which she infused into her work documenting the streets of her childhood borough, the Bronx. Meanwhile, the surreal and luminous work of Arielle Bobb-Willis takes cues from the dynamic abstractions of 20th-century modernist painters including Jacob Lawrence and Milton Avery. 

‘The way these images move rapidly between contexts, garnering new and often contradictory meanings, that allow them to simultaneously operate as racial representations while also being discrete product shots, documentations of family and glossies of the latest fashion trends,’ says Sargent. ‘For this generation of emerging imagemakers, the photographer's eye is illimitable: a picture is just a picture’

INFORMATION

‘Just Pictures’, until November 21, 2020, projects+gallery. projects-gallery.com

When it comes to famous faces, there are few that Rankin hasn’t photographed. But for his latest project, the British portrait photographer is turning his lens on the everyday heroes we might not know – the NHS frontline workers who have been keeping the health service going during the pandemic.

In a series of 12 portraits marking the 72nd anniversary of the NHS, Rankin shines a light on courageous medical staff from across the country including a midwife, 111 call handler, porter, nurse, cleaner, ICU consultant, paramedic and IT worker.

Having worked in the NHS in his younger days, it’s a project close that is very close to his heart. ‘I was a theatre porter for a bit of time between my studies. I loved it so much, it was a growing up, coming of age experience for me and I really got to experience the community, camaraderie and passion of the people who worked there.’ More recently, in 2019, he worked with Public Health England on a national campaign around mental health.

The portraits were taken over four days under lockdown conditions in an elaborate set-up which saw Rankin capture each subject from behind a plastic sheet (see more of this on our Instagram). ‘The social distancing when we’re photographing people was very strange; having to shout across two metres. We were all a little bit nervous, but meeting these incredible people gave me great confidence. Every person was so far beyond my expectations. They have so much humility and all are such characters. They really were larger than life people.'

‘Even to just give them an hour where they’re not having to think about this crisis, where they could just enjoy the process, that was really rewarding. These are people doing a job that is so so important to all of us.’

The photographer has kept the aesthetic of the images deliberately stripped back, with no hair or make-up and little retouching. ‘There’s no bells and whistles, I wanted to let the people speak for themselves. I just wanted to see their eyes and see their humanity because it’s so apparent looking at each of them.’

‘I really believe you can tell a lot about human beings from the way they look through the camera. These people speak for themselves, they really are heroes, they all say they’re not – but each of them has done something heroic. Their compassion and their humility is what links all of them. They are all passionate about being compassionate about what they do. These people are putting their lives at risk for us.’

The portraits will be displayed across Britain at bus stops, on billboards and at the Piccadilly Lights in London’s Piccadilly Circus. Reflecting on his hopes for how the Covid-19 crisis might reshape society Rankin says: ‘I do think that empathy will stay with us, I don’t think it will disappear overnight. We know that these frontline workers are here now, and we will respect them. If there’s anything positive about this pandemic – and very little has been positive about it – it’s that we have sped up change. Real caring about the community and the nation has become such an important part of our daily lives. The frivolous, shallow stuff is not as important anymore.’ 

INFORMATION

All portraits have been donated by Rankin to the NHS. england.nhs.uk/rankin

Peter Lindbergh still had the story of his complete works to tell. Right up until his death in September 2019, he continued working on ‘Untold Stories’, the first and only exhibition that he ever curated. From February 5 to June 1, the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast will be showing previously unseen aspects of Lindbergh’s work that illustrate the broad spectrum of his oeuvre and leave an unexpected legacy.

Peter Lindbergh was a great photographic narrator. The epic black-and-white picture series he created, featuring expansive beaches, urban canyons, factory sites or gloomy harbour districts as backdrops, were celebrated endlessly in magazine spreads across the world. From Claudia Schiffer to Naomi Campbell, the German photographer transformed models into brands and women into icons. The fashion world all agreed: the image of femininity he defined in the early nineties in the shape of the open, natural and adventurous woman has lost none of its relevance to this day.

Lindbergh’s sensual images, imbued with intimacy and trust suggest that the person on the other side of the lens meant more to him than fashion, the supposed context of his life’s work. What would he present to his audience as his best works? No one had ever asked him that, until Felix Krämer, the director of the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast since 2017, gave the photographer carte blanche for an exhibition. Lindbergh didn’t want to call it a retrospective, and as the 72-year-old joked in 2017, he still felt too young for it. 

In the two following years, Peter Lindbergh combed his archives, picking out ten dozen from all the hundreds of thousands of photographs that were most important to him. His most renowned works are part of the show, but unseen images also play a significant role: Uma Thurman, lying in half shade, 2016, an un-styled dark-haired Claudia Schiffer from 1997 and Naomi Campbell in 2000 in Ibiza. ‘It was like grappling with life and death,' Lindbergh is quoted as saying last July in the exhibition catalogue. This goes some way to explaining how hard it must have been for him to make the final selection.

‘Testament' is the title of the part of his show that reveals an atypical side of the German photographer and exemplifies his ability to cross the boundaries of fashion photography and contemporary art. The video work from 2013 shows a death row inmate gazing at himself in the mirror for thirty minutes. The film is moving, and the gaze of the inmate is difficult to bear. Also as a documentarist beyond the world of fashion, Lindbergh reveals human frailty without exposing it. Introspection, expression, empathy and freedom were the themes that he was concerned with all his life. ‘Essentially, the film deals with the impossibility of being truly free,' he said in an interview with Felix Krämer. The Duisburg-born photographer was also political; he wanted to penetrate beneath the surface, which becomes particularly palpable in ‘Testament’. As one of the previously unseen works, it is one of the ‘untold stories’ that gives the exhibition in Kunstpalast Düsseldorf its name. Lindbergh had been working on this retrospective during the last few weeks of his life, finishing it six days before his death. The fact that he gave so much space to this work could well be Lindbergh’s true legacy. What is fashion photography? What should it be? These were the questions that Lindbergh confronted as he developed his most personal exhibition to date. He now passes these questions on to his audience.

INFORMATION

‘Untold Stories’, until 19 September, Kunstpalast. kunstpalast.de

ADDRESS

Museum Kunstpalast
Ehrenhof 4-5
40479 Düsseldorf

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‘I’m not sure that a male artist, or a heterosexual woman artist, would paint as proudly and freely as this,’ says Anna McNay, curator of two parallel exhibitions on the female gaze in painting and photography today. The duet of shows at New Arts Project in London take the perspective of 12 queer women artists who look at each other, and themselves.

The term the ‘female gaze’ first emerged in opposition to the ‘male gaze’ coined by Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay of 1975, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, to illuminate the way women and their bodies are circumscribed by the patriarchy in culture. But, as McNay asserts, ‘the female gaze is more than just the opposite of the male gaze’. Riffing on the ideas of the radical French feminist writer Hélène Cixous, McNay says that, in 2018, ‘Woman must paint herself, must paint women and bring women to painting, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. And, to some extent, that is the goal of “Threesome”.’

Stages of Mourning IX, 2000

Interconnected with feminism, non-binary sexuality and gender, in ‘Threesome: an exhibition of three women painters’ three queer women painters attempt to broaden the discussion of the ‘female gaze’ in a direct way. British artists Sarah Jane Moon, Roxana Halls and Sadie Lee have each painted a self-portrait, a portrait of each other and a portrait of a nude model (performance artist Ursula Martinez) to bring the gaze into focus, an enquiry as to whether women see women differently, and how their sexuality affects their gaze on the female subject.

‘The key concern shared by Sarah Jane Moon, Roxana, Sadie and myself was how the gaze of a lesbian might differ from the gaze of a heterosexual woman,’ McNay explains. The portraits range in style and approach – from Lee’s powerfully erotic brushstrokes to Halls’ hallucinogenic pop. However, in their portrayal of Martinez, all three had exaggerated the subject’s crotch. Perhaps a response, McNay proffers, to the centrality of the nipple in the social media censorship maelstrom. ‘They were not unveiled to each other until the night, nor to me or the gallery until two nights before, when they were dropped off for us to hang. There was an element of unity in difference and difference in unity.’

Living Room, 2017

In ‘3x3: an exhibition of nine women photographers’, meanwhile, nine gay female photographers have taken self-portraits, some of them for the first time. ‘Again, it was an experiment in ways of looking, seeing, and being seen. By concentrating solely on their own image, the artists seek to untangle, distinguish, and, in some instances, deliberately re-confuse their own subjectivity and objecthood.’

Is there such a thing, then, as the ‘gay gaze’? ‘As a woman who likes women myself, it is hard to say whether my own gaze, enjoyment of and response to this painting is different from that of a heterosexual woman. There are so many knots and loops in this discussion, but that’s what makes it such an interesting subject to explore,’ McNay says.

Despite navigating the complexities inherent in labelling individuals and their art as ‘queer’ or ‘lesbian’, McNay adds: ‘I do think there is something more specific to the gaze in this exhibition than just the female gaze, even if it can’t be pinned down in linguistic terms. That’s really only something you can find out by coming and looking for yourself and exploring your own gaze and response to the works. ‘The gaze, after all, goes in two directions and may, or may not, be met midway.’

INFORMATION

‘Threesome: an exhibition of three women painters’ and ‘3x3: an exhibition of nine women photographers’ are on view until 4 March. For more information, visit the New Art Projects website

ADDRESS

New Art Projects
6D Sheep Lane
London E8 4QS

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Neoclassical architect Sir John Soane was a rambunctious art collector. Since his death in 1837, his London home has been left like a mausoleum. Today, still untouched at his request, the parlours and hallways are filled with piles of his own sketches, endless architectural drawings, and a bounty of antiquities pulled from all pockets of the globe.

Now a popular London museum, Sir Soane’s overflowing home has (somehow) found space for 12 new sculptures from artist Marc Quinn. Each intimately depicts the sculptor's muse, dancer Jenny Bastet, who follows the likes of artist Alison Lapper and Kate Moss in inspiring Quinn.

One of a handful of contemporary exhibitions displayed in the museum (recall the work of Sarah Lucas last year), this new offering is a particularly radical one. Quinn was one of the trailblazing Young British Artists who were scarcely out of the headlines in the early 1990s. His cultural capital and art-world celebrity ballooned with news of controversial sculptures of his own penis, and an infamous self-portrait made from buckets of his own blood. Though his new works highlight Quinn's more muted, sentimental tendencies, his legacy as an agent provocateur remains.

Fragments of Bastet’s exposed body, cast in skin-thin fibreglass, dance around the museum, weaving between pre-existing exhibits (elaborate mirrors, patterned rugs and stained glass windows). They depict her careening or stoically posing, rapt in the arms of another dancer (or lover?). They are hollow, headless, insufficient, playing on Quinn's longstanding interest in disjointed, fractional works.

There's no question that Bastet's raw nudity is at odds with the tight-lipped furniture in the Soane Museum's drawing rooms. ‘As with the Sarah Lucas exhibition, we did have a warning that it contained nudity,’ says the museum's current director Bruce Boucher. ‘I think there were only two objections. We have around 2,300 visitors a week.’

But would Soane have approved of what currently stands in his living room? Probably, argues Boucher, who has been at the helm since last year. ‘When Soane was alive, he was very much into contemporary British art, he bought a lot of contemporary paintings and sculptures. He tried to encourage young British artists, hoping they would be inspired by his collection. We feel like we are carrying out his mission.’

INFORMATION

‘Marc Quinn: Drawn from Life’ is on view until 23 September 2017. For more information, visit the Sir John Soane Museum website

ADDRESS

13 Lincoln's Inn Fields
London, WC2A 3BP

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In a brave exhibition at Cyprus' Diatopos Contemporary, model-turned-artist Efi Spyrou uses her own body as a canvas, acting as both the creator and the creation.

Shifting focus from model to artist was a natural step for Spyrou. 'The truth is, I've been working in the fashion industry for several years and considering my body as a medium-object,' she explains. 'Now, as an artist, I use the same anonymous medium-object to deal with social phenomena – whether this has to do with race, origin, age, sex.'

In a series of what curator Charis Kanellopoulou calls 'repetitive photographic surfaces', Spyrou's torso is captured in dynamic poses – naked but for poetic phrases printed on her skin. Mottos like 'Older Younger', 'Authenticity In Question' and 'Exotic Not Exhausted' relate to Spyrou's interest in the politics of the art and fashion scenes. They offer a refreshing irony often lacking in po-faced contemporary exhibitions. Drawing from her personal experiences, the portraits unapologetically borrow a high fashion aesthetic, but, the faceless pin-ups use contemporary artistic techniques – tattoos projected in LED lights, for instance – connecting them to their interactive gallery setting.

These oversized photographic posters form a backdrop to a series of animalesque sculptures collected in the centre of the space, that blur the boundary between art object and costume. Little Black Bird (2016), for example – made from latex, copper and PVC – makes use of the same materials and jutting pipes as an elaborate outfit Spyrou is wearing in one of her photographs. She considers the dual sculptural and photographic elements of the exhibition completely intertwined. 'They're like animals in the same field,' she explains. 'All of the works invite the viewer to experience them as part and as a whole of a self... a plural singularity.'

Spyrou's decision to include herself in the works is a courageous comment on how today's creative talents are expected to be both art-personality and artist – a manifold figure, continually available for comment; being prodded and poked by a media-hungry public. As Kanellopoulou says, 'she aims to move dynamically as well as flexibly, sometimes in spaces of internal operations and sometimes in areas of public display'. Through her raw, effecting self-portraits, Spyrou forces the viewer to assess their own interaction with the work, and also the person who created it.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Diatopos website

ADDRESS

Centre of Contemporary Art Diatopos
11DZ Crete Street. Nicosia
Nicosia 1061, Cyprus

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The story of the Marubi studio started in about 1850, when the Italian Pietro Marubi emigrated to Shkodër, Albania, for political reasons. In 1856, just two decades after photography was invented, he established a photographic studio with the camera he brought with him from Italy. The studio’s camera shutters were not to stop for more than a century.

'Dynasty Marubi – a hundred years of Albanian studio photography', an exhibition of that legacy, is currently being staged by Foam (Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam), where a stream of black and white images provides a record of important aspects of Albania’s history and its people, captured by three generations of studio photographers from 1856–1959. In this country – the visual culture of which is little known – the collection provides a rich photographic history that stretches from Ottoman times to the communist period and includes social rituals, traditional costumes and group portraits of sociological significance.

Pietro Marubi started his practice using the wet-plate collodion process, the standard method of photography across Europe at that time. There is no record of where the studio was first located, although many studies suggest that it was actually al fresco, which could be true looking at the portraits of a wide variety of the locals. On the master’s death, his assistant Kei took over the business and changed his name to Marubi, bringing in techniques such as special effects and the retouching of negatives – together with more sophisticated cameras. The third generation of the studio, Kei’s son Gegë, was trained at the Lumière brothers' school in France in the 1920s. He pioneered the use of celluloid instead of glass plates in what was regarded as the studio’s most successful period.

In the 1970s, Gegë donated the studio's collection – some 150,000 glass negatives – to the Directorate of General Archives. He dedicated the rest of his life to working on their conservation and died in 1984. The archive is now housed at the Marubi National Museum Of Photography, which opened earlier this year in Shkodër, in a building designed by Dutch studio Casanova+Hernandez Architects.

INFORMATION
’Dynasty Marubi – a hundred years of Albanian studio photography’ is on view until 27 November. For more information, visit the Foam website

Photography: Marubi National Museum of Photography, Shkodër

ADDRESS

Foam Fotografiemuseum
Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam

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Not so long ago, if you'd said that an automatic machine could print a lifelike, 3D portrait while you wait, you'd be told you need your head scanning – but this is precisely what the Royal Academy of Arts has on display this weekend.

The 'Veronica Scanner' (which takes its name from a portmanteau of the Latin word 'vera' meaning truth, and the Greek word for image, 'εικόνα'), uses an advanced form of digital photogrammetry to scan your head. Thousands of overlapping photographs are taken from many angles, then aligned by software algorithms – in what looks like a futuristic version of Photoshop – into a 3D model that can be rendered in a material of your choice. Perhaps marble, for a faux-classical (if slightly egocentric) bust.

Veronica, as the designers affectionately call her, has been developed by the Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation and the Rothschild Foundation over the course of two years into a fully integrated package, that takes you from sitting to sculpture in a matter of hours. This marks a new moment for digital portraiture, as Adam Lowe, director at Factum Arte, explains, ‘We think of photographs as images but this odyssey into 3D portraiture demonstrates that they can also be sculptures.'

Before being brought to the RA, Veronica was used primarily to aid cosmetic surgery procedures, providing acutely precise 'before and after' images. This exhibition shifts Veronica's focus to the art world for the first time, and no doubt a few photo-realist purists will have a thing or two to say about it. The artistry, the makers believe, comes in the technological advancements, the ideas and the scientific progress, not necessarily in the self-sculpted products.

Nonetheless, the resulting photo-sculptures are remarkable objects, and the artistic possibilities that they offer are astonishing. Portrait heads can be made giant, or tiny, and used to create perfect raw bases for sculptors to then embellish, should they wish. But the most exciting thing of all is that for the first time, we can preserve a thoroughly accurate, non-judgmental representation of the human face, unbiased by pen, lens or canvas. As Lowe says, 'The dream of the Greek sculptors was to create a realism that went beyond subjective interpretation. We are thrilled that both the RA and the Rothschild Foundation have reacted so quickly to bring this emerging technology to the public in a spirit of experimentation and curiosity.’

INFORMATION

The Veronica Scanner: Live 3D Portraiture' is on view until 11 September at Royal Academy of London, and again at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire from 22–30 October. For more information, visit the Royal Academy website

ADDRESS

Royal Academy
Burlington House
Piccadilly
London, W1J 0BD

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With the success of his 2012 landscape exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts still looming large, David Hockney returns once more to the RA. This time, he's occupying the Sackler Wing, with an intimate exhibition of recent portraits.

Painted over the last two and a half years in Hockney’s studio in Los Angeles, the exhibition is a window into his life in the City of Angels, with the subject of each portrait personally invited by the artist to sit for him. They range from friends and family to acquaintances and staff, and include recognisable figures such as Larry Gagosian, Jacob Rothschild, Frank Gehry and Celia Birtwell, as well as Hockney’s siblings.

Though the number of portraits is expansive, each has been created with a sense of uniformity; all are painted on the same size canvas within three days, and depict its subject seated in the same chair against a bright blue background. In doing so, Hockney aims to place emphasis on the personalities of his subjects, as well as his own development in the medium of acrylic paint. To highlight this progression, the works are hung chronologically throughout the galleries. The exhibition is curated through a close collaboration between Edith Devaney, curator of contemporary projects at the RA, and Hockney himself.

In addition to the portraits showcased, the RA will also release an illustrated book containing interviews with the artist, photographs of several of the paintings in the process of being completed, and an exploration of Hockney’s portraiture by Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon professor of the history of art at Yale University.

INFORMATION

’David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life’ is on view until 2 October. For more information, visit the RA’s website

ADDRESS

The Sackler Wing
Royal Academy of Arts
Burlington House
Piccadilly
London, W1J 0BD

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From now until September, Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam (FOAM) is dedicating its entire building to the late photography legend Helmut Newton. 'Helmut Newton: A Retrospective' comprises more than 200 works, ranging from early prints to monumental photos from the rich, authentic and complex oeuvre that illustrates the life of one of the 20th century's most celebrated masters of the art.

TIME named him ‘The King of Kink’, feminists called him ‘an exploiter of women’. The German-Jewish photographer himself joked that he was a pornographer. Women are the core of Newton’s creations; often provocatively feminine and invariably scantily clothed – which makes his works easy on the eye, but viewers are often distracted from appreciating their complexity and implications.

Newton's images are overwhelmingly about fashion photography, portraiture and nudity, and though he always worked on a commission basis, in a sense he was a social commentator on his era. ‘He had an intuition about the fundamental changes in society and the relationship between men and women, the power structure, feminism and sexual liberation; and he worked with it – not literally, but he transformed these givens into his own visual vocabulary,’ says Marcel Feil, deputy director of artistic affairs at FOAM.

Works are shown by genre in the colour-coded rooms of the Amsterdam canal house. Entering the show, one finds a selection of Newton’s 1960s studio works for Vogue, which marked the take-off of his fame; next is a mysterious world of exhibitionism and fetishism, where one experiences the tension between the two sexes. Iconic works made in the 1970s, like Yves Saint Laurent for French Vogue (1975), Bergström over Paris (1976) and Saddle I, Paris (at the Hotel Lancaster) (1976), plus some of the best celebrity portraitures from the 1980s, are seen on the upper floor, ending with the prodigious life-size Big Nudes and Naked and Dressed (1981).

‘Everything is a little slice of life, every picture is based on reality, I have no feverish imagination. It’s all real and it happens every day,’ Newton said in Helmut by June, a film on show made by his wife June Newton (AKA Alice Springs) in 1995.

In contemplating the relevance of such a body of works today, the museum was also influenced by the current state of society. Feil says, 'We are experiencing a new wave ­of emancipation – there are a lot of online activists and advocates for women – so it is an important time to start this conversation with the show. If Newton was a child of his time, what does our time tell us about this power game, equal rights and sexual morals? Is it a time of new prudishness? Is it a very hypocritical time? Because on one hand people can find everything online, pornography or perversity, and yet a nipple on Instagram will get your account blocked.’

Newton once said, ‘I love the word “powerful”; I always like strong woman because I feel secure.’ What is the representation of women in the digital era? Where are women standing now, in both the commercial and artistic sense? What can we learn from Newton about the gender issue by looking at his images today? The answer is up to us, of course – the voyeurs.

INFORMATION

’Helmut Newton: A Retrospective’ is on view until 4 September. For more information, visit the FOAM website

Photography courtesy FOAM

ADDRESS

Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam
Keizersgracht 609
1017 DS Amsterdam

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Over the course of history, the visual world has hardly been kind to women. In the 1980s, when Cindy Sherman, a young photographer from New York, was making a name with her self-staged portraits of female stereotypes from pop culture, she was, in part, reacting to widespread conservatism in the West. In the present day, where images have an even greater presence in our lives (it’s now thought that we collectively produce more than three trillion a year) Sherman’s postmodern protest is hardly less piquant.

Interestingly, in the first major survey of Sherman’s work in Los Angeles in nearly two decades, The Broad's guest curator Philipp Kaiser has chosen not to focus on the trendy topics raised by Sherman’s performed photographs, such as intersectional feminism and self-representation. Instead, he has tapped into more local connections in Sherman’s work: her engagement with film both as a source and as a medium, from her iconic Untitled Film Stills series and her 1997 feature film Office Killer, to her lesser-known rear projection series, inspired by late 1950s and 60s cinema.

Also among the 120 works going up – drawn primarily from the Broad's collection, the largest holding of Sherman’s work in the world – are a number of vastly influential series created in the period 1977–2003, including works from Sex Pictures, 1992, and her centrefold images.

So what new information can the viewer glean from this expansive survey of a 40 year career? The artist might always be present in her work, but she remains a perennial mystery. As she told The Guardian in a rare interview in 2011, ‘I'm not about revealing myself.’ When it comes to Sherman’s photographs, the question is always turned back on the person who’s looking.

INFORMATION

’Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life’ is on view from 11 June – 2 October. For more information, visit The Broad’s website

Photography courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures

ADDRESS

The Broad
221 S. Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012

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Mario Testino's first-ever exhibition in Denmark opened the fashion and art season in Copenhagen this year. 55 pieces of works from the titan of contemporary portraiture reside elegantly in GL Strand's mid-18th century building, designed by Dutch-Danish master Philip de Lange and which has been home to the Kunstforeningen for the last half century.

Testino's aptly named 'No Limits' exhibition delves into the many facets of the photographer's work and his constant quest to stretch his imagination further. In Testino's words, ‘You should use your aesthetics and point of departure for different purposes. You have to break with limitations.' He adds, 'When I first started working, I noticed how some photographers could only work in black and white, some stayed in the studio and others shot solely in colour. We always want to think we can only do one thing; I think that it is way more exciting to do it all and try out everything; and I like to show that you can actually be interested in nudity, in fashion and in royalty.’

Besides exploring the wide spectrum of Testino’s works, the exhibition also focuses on the juxtaposition of the art and the architecture. Each level of the building reveals a different scenography that creates harmony between Testino's photographs and their setting within the space, which is an important and recurrent theme in his works and speaks of the artist's close affinity with both photography and interior design. The show's layout has been arranged as if aligned with the notion that to create a perfect image, one first has to create a world for it. ‘In my work I have to define space every day. For every picture you take, you put a person in a space; and that space has to be designed, decided, approved, in order for that person to inhabit it.’ Testino explains. The show is arranged over three floors: on the first is his powerful and hugely influential oeuvre of fashion photography; on the second his intimate royal portraits; and on third floor his sober nudes.

To complete the architectural and spatial experience, the photographer and his team MARIOTESTINO+ have been working with Ege Carpets to create a site-specific bespoke textile installation on the stairway, enhancing the conversation that builds up from floor to floor. Playing with graphic motifs and typography, the design is a composite of Testino’s maxims over the years.

INFORMATION

’Mario Testino: No Limits’ will be on view until 18 September. For more information, visit the GL Strand website

ADDRESS

Kunstforeningen GL Strand
Gl. Strand 48
1202 Copenhagen

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Stevenson gallery in Cape Town, South Africa is presenting yet another new series from the lauded photographer Pieter Hugo. '1994', which constitutes portraits of children born in the post-1994 period in South Africa and Rwanda, is his sixth solo show with the gallery.

In South Africa, 1994 was the year that marked the end of apartheid; in Rwanda, the country's genocide terror stained the very same year. 'I happened to start the work in Rwanda but I’ve been thinking about the year 1994 in relation to both countries over a period of 10 or 20 years,' says Hugo. 'I noticed how the kids, particularly in South Africa, don’t carry the same historical baggage as their parents. I find their engagement with the world to be very refreshing in that they are not burdened by the past, but at the same time you witness them growing up with these liberation narratives that are in some ways fabrications. It’s like you know something they don’t know about the potential failure or shortcomings of these narratives.'

The portraits were mostly taken in villages around the two countries and show off the thin line between nature as idyllic and a place of terror. 'At times the children appear conservative, existing in an orderly world; at other times there’s something feral about them, as in Lord of the Flies, a place devoid of rules,' explains Hugo. 'This is most noticeable in the Rwanda images where clothes donated from Europe, with particular cultural significations, are transposed into a completely different context.'

'The images are conceptually loaded without feeling cluttered. Somehow they’re striking but buoyant,' says the Stevenson gallery's Sinazo Chiya.

INFORMATION

'Pieter Hugo' is on view until 16 July. For more information, visit the Stevenson gallery website

Photography copyright the artist. Courtesy Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg

ADDRESS

Stevenson
Buchanan Building
160 Sir Lowry Road
Woodstock 7925
Cape Town

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Yancey Richardson gallery in New York is currently presenting ‘Homage: Malkovich and the Masters’, which features photographer Sandro Miller’s images of the actor John Malkovich as other well-known figures.

At New York photography gallery Yancey Richardson, a very well-known Philippe Halsman portrait of Salvador Dalí looks a little off. While the late surrealist’s unmistakable moustache is in exactly the right place, it’s on the wrong face. It’s actor John Malkovich, actually, posing for commercial photographer Sandro Miller. 

Until 1 July, Yancey Richardson presents ‘Homage: Malkovich and the Masters’, a sample of Malkovich and Miller’s 2014 collaboration that was recently published as the book The Malkovich Sessions, by Glitterati Incorporated. Together, they had recreated 41 of some of history’s most iconic portraits, including Halsman’s Dalí. 

Rather than Miller simply superimposing Malkovich’s face directly into the photos, however, the actor fully assumed each role – makeup, wardrobe, posture, expression – for the camera: Bert Stern’s Marilyn Monroe, Annie Leibovitz’s naked John Lennon and Alberto Korda’s Che Guevara among them. For his part, Miller did his research over the course of a year, scrutinising each image’s lighting, composition and finish. His goal was to align his works with the originals in the minutest detail, with minimal digital intervention. 

Malkovich has been Miller’s muse for decades. The two first met at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company in the late 1990s, and have embarked on numerous collaborations, including a Nikon ad and a handful of films.

‘I have done nudes of John. I have dressed John like Henry VII, I have dressed John like the devil. And I once suspended John from a cross,’ Miller told the Chicago Tribune when the series debuted in 2014. ‘And John's never said no.’

The 2014 collaboration was recently published as a book, The Malkovich Sessions. Together, they recreated 41 of some of history’s most iconic portraits.

For his part, Miller did his research over the course of a year, scrutinising each image’s lighting, composition and finish. His goal was to align his works with the originals in the minutest detail, with minimal digital intervention.

Malkovich has been Miller’s muse for decades. The two first met at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Company in the late 1990s, and embarked on numerous collaborations, including a Nikon ad and a handful of films.

INFORMATION

’Homage: Malkovich and the Masters’ is on view until 1 July. For more details, visit Yancey Richardson’s website

Photography courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson gallery

ADDRESS

Yancey Richardson Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011

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During his life – and even beyond his death in 1989 – the late Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs were never without controversy. His black-and-white depictions of the gay New York subculture of the 1970s and 80s have been deemed indecent, pornographic, racist and exploitative – but also immaculately executed, visceral, beautiful and profound.  

Decades later, Mapplethorpe is having his LA moment with 'Robert Mapplethorpe: In Search of Perfection', a sprawling retrospective spanning not one, but two museums, LACMA and The Getty Center. Coinciding with these is West Hollywood gallery Moran Bondaroff’s ‘Dark and Light,’ which opened last week and runs until late June.

While Mapplethorpe’s many subjects included lovers, celebrities and female bodybuilders, ‘Dark and Light’ zeroes in on Mapplethorpe’s fascination with the black male body, another point of controversy in his career. He was accused of fetishising his subjects, portraying black men as anonymous and overtly sexualised, but these photographs cover a range of expressions – neoclassical in addition to erotic poses, and even smiling portraits, fully clothed.

‘I tried to balance these bodies,’ ‘Dark and Light’ curator Vince Aletti explains; in this show, these are also sometimes white, female and, in one instance, pregnant. They're interspersed with ‘other pictures that help define Mapplethorpe’s hungry and brilliantly idiosyncratic eye’, with ‘a vase of flowering branches in the dappled sun, Fran Lebowitz with a half-finished cigarette... a magnificently pregnant belly’, among them.

‘For me, it was like rediscovering what I love about Mapplethorpe,' Aletti continues. ‘His love of light and texture and the shape within the frame, and no matter how sexy it is, his classical approach to the body.’

Although the artist was accused of fetishising his subjects, the photographs here cover a wide range of expressions; neoclassical in addition to erotic poses, and even smiling portraits, fully clothed

‘I tried to balance these bodies,’ ‘Dark and Light’ curator Vince Aletti explains; in this show, these are also sometimes white, female and, in one instance, pregnant. Pictured: Chest / Livingston, 1987

‘For me, it was like rediscovering what I love about Mapplethorpe,’ Aletti continues. ‘His love of light and texture and the shape within the frame, and no matter how sexy it is, his classical approach to the body.’ 

INFORMATION
’Dark and Light’ is on view until 25 June. For more details, please visit Moran Bondaroff’s website

Photography: Liz Barclay. Courtesy Moran Bondaroff and Mapplethorpe Foundation

ADDRESS

Moran Bondaroff
937 N. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, California

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From 1957 to 1961, Wallace Berman lived in the Marin County township of Larkspur, California, where he took over an abandoned house on Madera Creek and turned it into Semina, a private gallery space where he would host one-day art exhibitions featuring his own work (and those of his contemporaries). It's fitting then, that curators Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon have recreated the footprint of the space – 'a phantom Semina gallery' – inside LA's Kohn Gallery for 'Wallace Berman: American Aleph'.

'What we're trying to do is really create a survey from the moment he started until he passed away in 1976,' says Bohn-Spector. Though Berman is known mostly for his Verifax collages (made by placing cult and commercial images over the template of a handheld Sony transistor radio from a 1964 advertisement in Life magazine) and as the high priest of Semina culture – the visual language disseminated through the titular art and poetry journal that Berman published (with work by William Burroughs and Walter Hopps, among others) for a few hundred select individuals in the post-war Beat counterculture – the show begins with Berman's early drawings that he made as a teenager, inspired by jazz greats like Jimmy Durante, Louis Armstrong and Slim Gaillard.

These hang on the outside wall of the phantom gallery, while inside it there is a photo, which appeared on the ninth and final issue of Semina, capturing Jack Ruby assassinating Lee Harvey Oswald (altered with the Michael McClure poem 'Double Murder') as well as photos of the sculptural collages – Temple and Veritas Panel – that he created for his one and only one-person show in 1957 at the Ferus Gallery, back when Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz were directing it.

'Everything was lost from that show except for the box hanging on that cross,' says Bohn-Spector, pointing to Factum Fidei, the mixed media combined with a faded photo of sexual penetration dangling off a white crucifix from a rusty chain. Mellon notes that Berman was arrested at the opening for an illicit drawing that Marjorie Cameron did for Semina, which was displayed on the floor inside one of the collages during the opening.

'Rumour has it that [Edward] Kienholz called the cops to make it controversial and they didn't even find the pornographic stuff,' explains Bohn-Spector. 'The vice squad ran right by it and came back. Finally, somebody had to point it out to them. It wasn't even his work. After the arrest, Dean Stockwell bailed him out and he felt like he had been backstabbed. So he left LA and went to San Francisco where he met Jay DeFeo.'

INFORMATION

’Wallace Berman: American Aleph’ is on view until 25 June. For more information, visit the Kohn Gallery’s website

Photography courtesy Kohn Gallery

ADDRESS

Kohn Gallery
1227 North Highland Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038

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There’s a hint of the megalomaniac in Georg Baselitz’s art. In recent years his output has accelerated, as if he is battling to keep up with the frantic energy he projects in his work. In his latest show, ‘Wir fahren aus (We’re off)', the scale and number of his paintings, drawings and sculptures can barely be contained by the cavernous White Cube in Bermondsey.

Baselitz focuses on his subjects with an intensity that borders on the obsessive. With the exception of two sculptures, everything on show in ‘Wir fahren aus’ is based on a handful of figurative subjects.

In the monumental oil paintings – 16 of them altogether – Baselitz has returned to an older portrait of himself and his wife Elke. Their bodies are rendered as stark, contorted figures in white or pink, floating in thin mists of paint against dark backgrounds. At their best, these works live up to their enormous scales with a clarity of composition and subtlety of texture.

The inspiration for these paintings came from Otto Dix, the influential portraitist of inter-war Germany; in fact, throughout ‘Wir fahren aus’ there are hints of an expressive, macabre German and Austrian tradition that also includes Egon Schiele and George Grosz. This is especially true of the works in ink, which combine an aggressive, incisive line with vaporous blotches of yellow and purple watercolour.

Baselitz is almost 80, and one of this exhibition’s main themes is aging. It appears that, like many artists before him, this preoccupation will only make him more productive.

INFORMATION

’Wir fahren aus (We’re off)’ is on view until 3 July. For more information, visit the White Cube’s website

Photography courtesy the artist and White Cube

ADDRESS

White Cube
144–152 Bermondsey Street
London, SE1 3TQ

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'In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3/11’ opens today – Friday, 11 March – at New York’s Japan Society, coinciding with the five-year anniversary of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant failure that struck northeast Japan.

The show was originally on view at MFA Boston in 2015 as a response to the disaster being the most widely photographed in history. ‘After everyone saw the images all over the media, we felt that photography would be an appropriate first stage of communicating the damage, both seen and unseen,’ the museum’s senior curator of Japanese art, Anne Nishimura Morse, says.

For its exhibition, Japan Society reorganised the 90 photographs into three sections: straightforward documentation, technical manipulation to convey a visual language, and post-disaster images of Tōhoku, the epicentre of the devastation.

The works grapple with expressing the visible effects of a natural disaster, such as collapsed buildings and abandoned pets, as well as the invisible, such as nuclear contamination and psychological damage. The exhibition opens with Naoya Hatakeyama’s richly colored, large-scale photographs of his hometown Rikuzentakata, before and after the tsunami hit.

Other series include Munemasa Takahashi’s ‘Lost and Found’­ – a collection of 750,000 damaged photographs that Takahashi has attempted to reunite with their owners; and works by Takashi Arai, who made daguerreotypes each day following the disaster and paired them with images of the Hiroshima bombing. The exhibition also features work by Tomoko Yoneda, Keizo Kitajima, Kozo Miyoshi, Lieko Shiga, Yasusuke Ota, Takashi Homma and Ishu Han, among many others (17 in total).

Yoko Ono, who was born and grew up in Tokyo, is installing her acclaimed interactive artwork Wish Tree in the Japan Society’s foyer. ‘In the Wake’ will be on view until 12 June.

INFORMATION

’In the Wake’ is on view until 12 June. For more information, visit the Japan Society’s website

ADDRESS

Japan Society
333 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017

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'As a child builds with his or her own hands a toy to play with, that was photography for me.' This is the rather poetic answer of Mozambican photographer Mário Macilau when asked how his practice began. It’s quite a story: Macilau started out with a borrowed camera when he was 14, photographing rural Mozambicans bringing goods to the capital Maputo, where he worked at a market. He developed the images at home in an improvised dark room, and later traded his mother’s mobile phone for a Nikon FM2.

Since then Macilau has won numerous awards, and his work is going to the VOLTA art fair, New York, at the start of March. But inspiring as it is to see an artist rise from obscure poverty, this is not the way Macilau would have you look at his photography. His mission is to cast light on some of the most invisible people and places in Maputo and beyond, giving these 'isolated groups a way to retrieve their own voice and hidden identity'.

Macilau does this with photographs that, although undoubtedly bleak, smoulder with personal intimacy and memory. His subjects are starkly framed in a way that seems to drag the viewer into their subterranean lives. Likewise, Macilau says his black and white aesthetic is about 'the experience of composition, light, shadow, and texture.' You feel present in a way that is more visceral than voyeuristic.

These techniques allow Macilau to emphasise shared humanity. 'I like close-ups because they break the borders between people and confirm trust,' he says. The bold faces and limbs in his photographs project a certain confidence, implying control over their chaotic backgrounds. Macilau’s subjects may be neglected, but for that reason they are all the more masters of their own fate.

Mário Macilau is part of a new generation of African photographers, including the Ghanaian Nii Obodai and Ethiopian Michael Tsegaye, who are using art to reclaim this dynamic continent from the pity of the Western lens. 'It’s still hard to change the way people see Africa,' Macilau says, 'because some people don’t want to see the reality. But I am changing it.'

INFORMATION
VOLTA art fair runs from 2–6 March in New York. For more information, visit Mário Macilau’s website

Photography copyright the artist. Courtesy Ed Cross Fine Art, London

In fashion, a seminal moment will occasionally transpire that will etch itself irreversibly in the consciousness of the industry at large.

When Vivienne Westwood showed her spring collection at Paris’ Grand Hotel in 1994, it was a perfect storm of a designer at the height of her powers coupled with an unparalleled cast of runway talent that would come to redefine the industry. Luckily, for those that missed it, the show is the subject of a new exhibition of photographs – at London’s Webber Gallery Space and by photographer Steve Harries – entitled Vivienne Westwood, Café Society, 1994.

A visual and sensual extravaganza, the show featured the likes of supermodels Nadja Auermann, Yasmin le Bon, Helena Christensen and Kate Moss decked out in creations of rustling silk and taffeta, squeezed into corsets and strutting insouciantly to a soaring baroque soundtrack. The show debuted at a time when Westwood was exploring the exchange of sartorial ideas between France and England, and thus the result was in part a reference to 19th century France and an homage to the influential British couturier Charles Worth, while the volume of each gown and train had reached maximum proportions due to a collaboration with her husband and design partner Andreas Kronthaler.

Backstage, a young Harries – then a 21-year old student at Central St Martins – was assisting fellow photographer and friend Gavin Bond, who were both given a rare chance to record what would become a seminal moment in British fashion. 'It was incredibly exciting', he tells Wallpaper*. 'I had experienced being backstage at Saint Martins graduate shows and was surprised at how comparatively calm this felt. People were privileged to be there and worked hard – with my limited knowledge of fashion at the time I still knew the collection was special.'

Westwood – an inspiring and generous presence to the assembled backstage cast – asked Harries to document the collection’s details, including the shoes and accessories, during which time he took the images that form the exhibition. After processing the films in Paris following the show and hand printing the bromide prints, the final images lay untouched in a shoebox in his home for over 20 years.

Though he was initially reluctant to show the images after so many years, Harries relented when he realised aesthetic similarities between the images and his current work. 'These pictures have a certain spontaneity that I love, as well as evoking an obvious sense of nostalgia,' he says.

INFORMATION

’Steve Harries: Vivienne Westood, Café Society, 1994’ is on view until 20 March. For more information, visit Webber Gallery Space’s website

Photography courtesy the artist and Webber Gallery Space

ADDRESS

Webber Gallery Space
18 Newman Street
London, W1T 1PE

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On 16 February, on a packed fourth floor at Aperture Foundation’s Chelsea gallery, Torbjørn Rødland deconstructed the process and inspiration behind his famed subversive photographs. A Norwegian photographer living in LA, Rødland is known for his sensual still lifes and abilities in elevating the banality of everyday objects.

After discussing photographers like Cindy Sherman and Christopher Williams, Rødland presented what he called 'The Evolution of the LOLcat', a development from the dry, distant language-conscious cat-memes of ten years ago to the life goals-hashtags of today. Rødland sees this as a mainstream confirmation of his overall project of personally investing in ridiculous popular images.  

His background in art-as-linguistic-analysis manifests itself in Practical Photography, a 4-by-5-ft chromogenic print of stacked magazines, spines facing outward to be read. Rødland explains that even though the world of popular image-making here is reduced to words and headings, nearby photographs in the same exhibition has him taking on these clichés of amateur photography to see if they can still somehow hold meaning.

‘When I first saw Cindy Sherman’s early original prints, I was disappointed because there was nothing more to see than what I already had seen in small reproductions,' he says. 'I try to make my prints large enough to reveal more detail, but not so large that the medium itself is exposed.’

Open exploration is key to Rødland’s photography. He plays around with different ideas and configurations to see what is revealed. This is how he became fixated on opposites: ‘In the same way you might learn more about yourself by dating different people, I like to pair different objects and photographs and see how they react in their new context.’

He also shared the logic behind his use of commonplace items, such as a birthday cakes, cassette tapes and napkins. ‘I know, of course, that these are highly unoriginal forms,' he says.  ‘But instead of referring to an original, I try to compete with it to see if these motifs can still carry meaning.'

Rødland plans to revisit American politics in the upcoming year – he has previously focused on Reagan and the 2004 Presidential Election. He sees the current election as an excellent example of 'clashing world views and these different states of consciousness, so there will be something,' he says. 'I am just not sure when.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Aperture's website

Photography courtesy of Torbjørn Rødland and Aperture Foundation

ADDRESS

Aperture
4th Floor
547 W 27th Street
New York, NY 10001

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Legendary choreographer Martha Graham famously referred to ballet as 'language of the soul'. But for all its poetic beauty, there is a brutal reality; an unyielding physical struggle in search of artistic perfection. 

This duality is the subject matter of photographer Rick Guest's latest series 'What Lies Beneath', due to open at the Hospital Club Gallery later this week (22 January.) 

Created in collaboration with stylist Olivia Pomp, the series of portraits – Guest's second focusing on dancers – strips away the glory of dance to reveal the determination and sacrifice behind the art form. 'I wanted to make a series of portraits of the dancers themselves, as opposed to dancers dancing,' explains Guest. 

Dancers from The Royal Ballet, The English National Ballet, the Richard Alston Dance Company, and Wayne McGregor's Random Dance come under his inquisitive lens, 'I wanted to see how their art has both shaped and etched itself into their bodies.' 

This level of disclosure – dancers stripped down to their worn and battered practise uniforms (the smallest piece of self expression in an otherwise uniform act) – is rare indeed. After all, these are performers who have trained their entire lives to conceal the enormity of the effort at hand. 'I think that this does a great disservice to the dancers. Having a sense of what lies beneath both enhances our experience of the performance and leads to a more profound appreciation of the dancer’s essential being.'

A number of limited edition prints will be on sale during the exhibition, as well as an accompanying book designed by Loose Joints, which also features an essay by art editor Sarah Crompton.

INFORMATION

’What Lies Beneath’ is on view from 22–31 January. The book is available to pre-order via the Rick Guest Books website

ADDRESS

Hospital Club Gallery
24 Endell Street
London, WC2H 9HQ

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It’s high time WOMEN had an update, really, given everything that’s happened in the last 15 years with regard to roles, expectations and the voice of feminism across the world. And happily, Annie Leibovitz is finally now on the case, thanks to a new collection of photographs commissioned by UBS that will act both as an evolution of the famous WOMEN series of portraits that Leibovitz started with Susan Sontag in 1999, and also reflect the changing roles of women today.

The new photographs are destined to form part of the UBS Art Collection (a corporate collection of contemporary art that to date comprises more than 30,000 works) but only after they have toured the world. After kicking off at London’s Wapping Hydraulic Power Station (formerly the site of The Wapping Project) on 16 January, an exhibition of the portraits will visit ten international cities, from Frankfurt to Tokyo, over the course of 2016.

Women is Leibovitz’s best known and arguably best loved series – with the first collection including portraits of Louis Bourgeois, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Gloria Steinem. Deciding on the subjects to best represent today’s spectrum of female role models can’t have been easy, but Leibovitz has this time turned her lens on Misty Copeland, Alice Waters, Serena and Venus Williams, Jane Goodall, and Amy Schumer. An image of the artist herself with her three daughters is the only image to have been unveiled thus far.

This exhibition will celebrate women affecting a positive change in the world, says Johan Jervøe, global chief marketing officer for UBS. 'Throughout her career Annie has captured the pulse and tenor of contemporary life, creating unique, personal and insightful portraits that have become her trademark,' he explains. 'We want to enable as many people as possible to see and respond to this thought-provoking series and to be inspired to fulfill their own creative practice.'

INFORMATION

’WOMEN: New Portraits’ is on view from 16 January. For information on dates and venues, visit UBS’ website

In October, Amsterdam and New York-based Dana Lixenberg loaded her car with copies of her new book Imperial Courts 1993–2015 and drove to the town of Watts in Los Angeles. The books were a gift to the residents of Imperial Courts, an overwhelmingly African-American estate in South LA, who were looking forward to seeing the woman they know as the ‘picture lady’, who has been photographing their families in the past 22 years.

The story of the Dutch photographer’s bond with Imperial Courts began in 1993 when she was assigned by the Dutch magazine, Vrij Nederland, to document the reconstruction of the area, which had been wrecked by racial riots. The community’s frustration and isolation moved her to start the project.

She was not granted easy access; Tony Bogard, then leader of a major neighbourhood gang, had wanted to know: ‘What do we get out of it?’ In her book, Lixenberg admits, ‘I still can’t really answer his question. What do photographs give to people, outside of the opportunity to remember our past and those we might otherwise forget?’ People were reluctant, at first, but working with a large, awkward camera (a 4x5 large format film camera) and gifting Polaroids must have helped her to win people over.

She was not naïve, but was determined tell the lives of her subjects from an angle other than the extremely one-dimensional reportage at that time. The portraits are pared down; the emotions and drama come direct from the de-sensationalized, subjects themselves rather than any attempt to focus on the background that shaped them.

Two months later, the Imperial Courts work was first presented in the Netherlands. But that was only the beginning and Lixenberg continued to visit throughout the years. ‘People started asking when I would come back to take more pictures,’ she says. I became more aware of photography as a tool to really document and preserve personal history.’

She returned to Imperial Courts with her camera in 2008 to work on a more thorough and layered documentation; this time, she began using sound and video. She started looking at the landscape and the relentless reality and unwritten rules of the still-racist society that shaped its inhabitants.

In December, her exhibition, in the same name as the book, opened at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam. Photos from the past two decades are carefully curated in the canal-house, multi-floor space. The time span between the images allow the viewer to imagine the stories that have taken place in the interim. In the attic, a 1999 Dutch television documentary of the project is shown side by side the video Lixenberg made during her October 2015 visit.

Yet, it is not goodbye. The project goes on in the form of an interactive website, which allows the residents to contribute and continue writing their family’s history. 

INFORMATION
Find out more about the Imperial Courts Project, website

’Imperial Courts 1993–2015’ is on view at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, until 6 March 2016 

ADDRESS

Keizersgracht 401, 1016 EK Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Mexico City-born painter Giovanni Garcia-Fenech spent over a decade working in the New York art world — as the news editor for Artnet; gallery manager at the beloved, if short-lived outer-borough spaces, The Project and Roebling Hall; and finally serving as Communications Director for The Armory Show — until he made his ‘great escape’, or should we say return, to painting full time in 2010.

This past October, Garcia-Fenech was included in the inaugural group show at the buzzy Puerto Rican gallery Embajada, located in a former sex toy shop in San Juan. Now, the artist is preparing for his New York solo debut at Postmasters in Tribeca. As Garcia-Fenech jokes, ‘Leaving the art world has been the best thing I could do for my career as an artist.’

In retrospect, it certainly appears to have been a wise move. Garcia-Fenech's painting career has been on a circuitous route since his student days at the School of Visual Arts, where he mostly made ‘obnoxious hard-edge paintings inspired by Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations and second-hand readings of post-structuralism,' he says, adding, ‘like a big jerk.’

For many years, he pursued biomorphic abstraction — ‘post-Brice Marden stuff, just layers and gestures’ — that referenced human forms but not overtly. ‘At some point I felt that I should stop hiding it and start painting the human body,’ he says. ‘I was really burnt out with the art world and I just wanted to do something I felt would be a little more honest and a little more direct. You go to art school and learn all this stuff and it's hard to get out of this theoretical mindset and you want people to perceive you as intelligent and knowledgeable and I realised it was making my art really boring.’

His first few attempts at self-portraiture felt ‘really embarrassing’, but Garcia-Fenech started receiving overwhelmingly positive responses from his friends. His heavy-limbed, tiny-headed doppelgängers, which sort of evoke Fernando Botero figures stuffed inside Matisse gestures, are all studies in mark-making that press up against the borders of the canvas in unique poses that tweak classical notions of perception and scale. ‘I was reading Matisse's biography, which I admit I gave up on because I found it too boring, but one of the things I found interesting was that he loved Russian icons and medieval art and Islamic art and that's all stuff I really look at a lot,’ says Garcia-Fenech, noting the paintings are 'really meant to be self-portraits, sometimes extremely distorted, but I really do try to get a sense of what it feels like to be myself and my discomfort with my body while trying to squeeze some grace out of it.’

That can mean a flattened balloon-like head stuck inside one half of a diptych and a tangle of disparate limbs painted at a different time in the neighboring canvas (as seen in his Corner Paintings), arachnocentric phalanges (Hand Studies), black and flesh-toned versions of himself with beanpole legs and hulking shoulders with highly articulated, if microscopic, genitalia pushing his tiny skull into contortions (Square Paintings), or similar figures negotiating what appear to be one large and one small exercise ball within the confines of a square (Two Problems).

‘I put in these circles that are drawn freehand because I wanted to complicated the paintings a little more,’ he says of this last series. ‘I call them Self-Portraits with Two Problems as a joke because they can also be seen as symbolising something that makes me really uncomfortable and forces me to bend into these uncomfortable positions.’

Garcia-Fenech established these parameters to counteract the improvisational nature of his painting. ‘Otherwise I wouldn't know where to go, so by forcing myself to do the paintings all in one shot or touching each border at some point, that dictates a lot of the form,’ he says. ‘I just didn't want them to be overworked and I felt if I planned them a lot they could very easily feel very slick.’

To further combat such results Garcia-Fenech works on unprimed canvas — it better mimicks the imperfections of real human skin while not forgiving mistaken brushstrokes — and he completes each painting within a single day to keep his attention laser-focused. After a recent trip with his wife to Siena, Italy, Garcia-Fenech came across 12th century shaped-canvas paintings of crucifixes which led to his new L-Shaped Paintings, six of which will be shown alongside a pair of Two Problems works at Postmasters.

‘The crucifixes definitely weren't the best artworks we saw but they were interesting because they were made in the shape of the cross and had the body of Christ inside this shape of the cross and that's sort of what I'm doing,’ says Garcia-Fenech, who just ordered some round stretchers for a potential new series of circular complications that may involve trees and snakes. At their best, Garcia-Fenech's sinuous arabesques have the power to evoke all the emotions and sensations of the figures trapped inside his canvases, whatever shape(s) they may assume. ‘I want you to have a sensual experience when looking at them.'

Information
New Paintings by Giovanni Garcia-Fenech opens on 11 December and runs through 23 January

Address

Postmasters Gallery
54 Franklin Street
New York, New York

Belfast-born photographer Hannah Starkey’s images are poised between documentary and cinematic fiction (her American counterpart Philip-Lorca diCorcia springs to mind). For her latest (and seventh) solo exhibition at Maureen Paley, London, the artist doesn’t deviate far from her formula with a collection of predominantly new photographs captured this year.

Starkey is best known for her portraits of women in solitude, honing in more recently on subjects within the confines of a city environment. Capturing intimate moments of private reflection, the London-based artist’s photographs are imbued with a theatrical quality that sees her role in its making straddle that of director and voyeur.

Her interest in street photography can be traced back to a nineteenth century concept of the flâneur – or stroller, lounger, saunterer or loafer. ‘The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes,’ explained American writer and critic Susan Sontag in her seminal On Photography. And that sentiment is captured earnestly in Starkey’s images.

In one image, a silhouette emerges against a kaleidoscopic backdrop; in another, a series of mirrors offer fragmented glimpses of the world behind Starkey. The only work that jars in this small but perfectly formed outing is the oldest: an untitled photograph from early-2013 depicting a pink-haired subject clasping an umbrella. It’s a melancholic exhibition worth a moment of quiet contemplation.

INFORMATION
Hannah Starkey’s exhibition runs until 24 January 2016. For more information visit the Maureen Paley website

ADDRESS

Maureen Paley
21 Herald Street
London E2 6JT

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The mystique of royal dynasties has always gripped the public’s imaginations, even today, when their roles have mostly become symbolic. Photojournalist George Osodi offers an alternate glimpse into modern day monarchy through his portraits of Nigeria’s tribal kings, in a new exhibition opening today at London’s Bermondsey Project, curated by Ziggi Golding of Zphotographic.

Nigeria's monarchs were stripped of their constitutional powers in 1963, yet they remain part of the country's political and social landscape. Osodi’s large-scale images depict them in full regal fare, their somber expressions often in stark contrast with their colourful garments.

For the Lagos-based photographer, venturing beyond formal portraits to investigate the monarchs’ environments was key. Osodi was eager to capture their tastes in architecture and fashion as the tribes reposition themselves in the new millenium.

‘Unfortunately, a lot of the newer generations cannot relate with or identify their traditional rulers,’ says Osodi. He still has hope, however, that the old and the new can be reconciled: ‘I am of the view, especially in this time of sectarian and insecurity crisis, that people generally see the diverse nature among its various people as a strength, and not as a weakness or divide.’

A great deal of mystery still shrouds Nigeria's reclusive outliers, which Osodi has neatly resolved by the inclusion of a brief historical biography on the tribe and rituals associated with each rulers’ image. The kings are vestiges of an ancient tradition, and the series is a remarkable addition to the country's sorely lacking historical archives.

ADDRESS

Bermondsey Project
46 Willow Walk   
London SE1 5SF  

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