Nan Goldin is an American photographer known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Goldin’s images act as a visual autobiography documenting herself and those closest to her. (more…)
After having already enjoyed careers as a model, journalist and gallerist, Bettina Rheims began to explore photography in her late twenties, and has since become one of France’s most internationally acclaimed contemporary practitioners. Her style has often been shaped by the glamour of fashion photography, yet she has also explored religious subjects, picturing scenes from the life of Christ in the controversial series INRI (Monacelli, 1999), and in 1995 she was commissioned to take the official portrait of Jacques Chirac. In 2002 she was awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for her lifetime’s achievement.
Rheims established herself with a dramatic series of portraits of strip-tease artists and acrobats, which won her a solo exhibition at the Pompidou Centre as early as 1981. From there she moved on to Animal, a series of images of stuffed animals which seem eerily alive, but since then she has always put the human figure at the centre of her work. In the mid 1980s she produced many portraits of actors and other celebrities for magazines such as Elle and Paris Match.
While she has had considerable popular success with her work, she has never compromised her taste for the strange and shocking. In Modern Lovers (1989-91) she depicted a series of androgynous adolescents. In her famous series Chambre Close, her first in color, she found a group of ordinary women to pose nude in unconventional poses; and these images were coupled with a fictional text by Serge Bramly for their publication in 1994, marking the first of what have been several important collaborations. And in Morceaux Choisis (2001) she produced a stylish twist on pornography.
Bettina Rheims lives and works in Paris. Over a decade of her portraits of women were collected in the volume Female Trouble (1989); More Trouble (Schirmer/ Mosel, 2004) supplies another retrospective survey. Among her recent books is Shanghai (PowerHouse, 2004), the product of six months immersed in the Chinese city. Rheims was awarded the Grand Prix de la Photographie de la Ville de Paris in 1994. Since her first solo exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, Rheims has exhibited at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Bijbelsmuseum, Amsterdam; and the Kunsthaus Wien. Retrospectives have been staged recently at the Kunsthal, Rotterdam, in 2006, and the Musée d’art Contemporain, Lyon, in 2008.
[Edwynn Houk Gallery]
Nan Goldin is an American photographer known for her deeply personal and candid portraiture. Goldin’s images act as a visual autobiography documenting herself and those closest to her. (more…)
If Ryuichi Sakamoto had been born in 16th century Italy, we’d know what to call him: a Renaissance Man. But since he was born in Japan in the mid-20th century, we have to string together words like composer, musician, producer, actor, and environmental activist. (more…)
Places with a strong soul, where the sea connects with the strength of women. In South of Italy passion and dignity along with spirituality and suspension can be seen through the cracks of the walls. (more…)
On the horizon of the district between old, handmade fences and the sky, you can see the newly built glass skyscrapers in the bright light of the coastal center of the city, as if portending future innovations of Bayil. (more…)
The U.N. has designated November 25th as International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. By truism, this is a proposition that states really nothing beyond what is implied by its terms… (more…)
International Women’s Day: Founded over a hundred years ago evolving through various names and dates, this fulcrum of women’s rights was adopted by the United Nations only in 1975 and is still largely overlooked in many countries. (more…)
Once again we arrive at the end of another year. 2021 was a year replete with contradictions and conflict, tension and turmoil. Two years since the start of the pandemic, a return to normal eludes us.
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Lu Guang was born in 1961, in Zhejiang Province, China. He has been passionate about photography since he held a camera for the first time, in 1980 when he was a factory worker in his hometown in Yongkang County. (more…)
With Anselm Kiefer contemporary art comes to the Palazzo Ducale, with an exhibition as the centerpiece of the fifth edition of MUVE Contemporaneo, the biennale organized by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia (more…)