Paolo Roversi @ Fondazione Sozzani, Milan

Paolo Roversi: Incontri
Fondazione Sozzani, Milan

Through February 11, 2018

As a complement to the large exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, PAOLO ROVERSI’s exhibition “Incontri” at the Fondazione Sozzani highlights the strictly painterly structure of his photographs.

Beyond any specific model or subject, Paolo Roversi’s artistry lives in composition and geometry. He possesses an abstract approach to reality. Since the early 80s, his photographs have met the demands of a constant formal rigor which lends them an astonishingly timeless character, in contradiction to the tastes and customs of fashion. His familiarity with the history of art, and with Italian painting in particular, allows him to make photographs in the manner of a painter. He often works in series on a single theme or model, as if he sought to capture every last one of its formal possibilities.

For the present exhibition, Paolo Roversi has brought his photographs together in twos and threes: diptychs and triptychs. This technique, never systematically employed by him until now, affords the viewer an unprecedented vision of these works, as it gives them a monumental dimension. Composing a painting in several parts confers greater importance upon a subject through a proliferation of readings, as in Renaissance painting, which made extensive use of this technique. In this exhibition, Paolo Roversi’s photography appears more serene, more mastered, than ever before.

Among the thirty diptychs and triptychs created especially for this exhibition – on the basis of photographs which are among his most important works – this selection also exhibits, for the first time, a set of mutual portraits made in 2001 in Nova Scotia with the great American photographer Robert Frank.

PAOLO ROVERSI

Paolo Roversi (Ravenna, 1947) began working as a photojournalist for The Associated Press in the 1970s. In November 1973, at the suggestion of Peter Knapp, creative director of the magazine Elle, he moved to Paris where he worked as a photojournalist for the Huppert Agency.

In 1974, he became assistant to British photographer Laurence Sackman. After leaving Sackman's studio, Roversi began taking pictures for Elle and Dépêche Mode. His first major photographic commission was published in Marie Claire, and in 1980 when he signed the Christian Dior campaign.

In 1980, Paolo Roversi started using Polaroid 20x24cm film and collaborating with leading fashion magazines around the world: Elle, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. In those years he starts shooting the fashion campaigns for some of the most important fashion names: Yohji Yamamoto, Azzedine Alaïa, Comme des Garçons, Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, Hermès, Giorgio Armani and Valentino.

In 1996, he won the Trophée de la Mode Paris and in 2001 and he was awarded the China Fashion Award. In 2000, he exhibited in Milan at Galleria Carla Sozzani; in 2002, in New York at the Pace/MacGill Gallery; in 2006, in Japan at Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse Number 1; in 2008, at the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d'Arles; and in 2009, at the Camera Work Galerie in Berlin; in 2017 in Milan at Palazzo Reale and at Fondazione Sozzani.

Paolo Roversi published several monographic books including two books focused on portraits: “Angeli” in 1994 and “Al Moukalla” in 1995 for Camera Oscura and many monographies such as "Una Donna", Carla Sozzani Editore, 1989; "Nudi", Editions Stromboli, 1999; "Libretto", Editions Stromboli, 2000; "Studio", Steidlangin, 2005; "Secrets", Editions Stromboli, 2013; “Dior Images”, Rizzoli International, 2018.

Curated by Alessia Glaviano

Fondazione Sozzani

Galleria Carla Sozzani

Corso Como 10 – 20154 Milano, Italia

www.galleriacarlasozzani.org

Angus McBean at Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan

ANGUS MCBEAN
Photographs
Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan
6 December 2001 - 13 January 2002

Angus McBean (1904 -1990) was the last true surrealist in the history of photography and one of the most original twentieth-century British photographers. At the end of the '30s he revived a movement that had been repudiated due to the natural evolution of its greatest members.

He was an unusual individual who fit into the rigid schemes of a conservative society for years before rebelling against the system.

He left a steady job with Liberty, the respectable London department store, to dedicate himself to his art, first making papier-mâché masks which were soon appreciated as decorative objects in high society, and later turning to photography.

His rise to success as a transgressive photographer was not easy; a 1940 article in the authoritative British Journal of Photography attempted to dismantle him.

And yet, he was a star portrait photographer, much in demand for his imaginative and fantastic compositions. What was wrong with Angus McBean, according to the traditionalists in photography, was that he violated the rules of composed studio photography, with its lights and backdrops in gentle hues in the taste of his day. His portraits were, on the contrary, dominated by violent and dramatic contrasts. This style, which we now appreciate for its modernity, attracted the great actors of British theatre, tired of being portrayed in stuffy poses.

In 1936, a very young and beautiful actress made her debut on the stage: Vivien Leigh. McBean’s gentle portrait of her veiled in subtle melancholy won Leigh the part of Rossella in Gone with the wind. But Angus McBean not only made innovative portraits, he revolutionised photography. He had a three-dimensional concept of the portrait, which with artful virtue he managed to set in 'scenic' situations. He used sand, papier-mâché columns, seashells, puppet theatres, lovely turn-of-the-century toys and other objects to create sets in which to insert his subjects, often using the craftiest techniques of photomontage and skilful tricks in the darkroom. The result is a highly improbable and fascinating image.

Angus McBean’s work does not attempt to stupefy us and overwhelm us in a maze of surrealistic situations. What he does is destabilise the rules with refinement to encourage adventures of the imagination.   

With a rare sense of humour, Angus McBean manages to reconcile intellectual challenge, sophisticated fun and beauty in images that are truly unique in modern and contemporary photography.

He had such a great influence on the history of photography that in 1983 and 1984 – at the age of eighty – he was invited to Paris to take fashion photographs in his unique style for prestigious magazines.

Angus McBean’s works are rare, precious signed and dated vintage photographs, exhibited with his own descriptions and notes.

Galleria Carla Sozzani

Corso Como 10 - Milan

www.galleriacarlasozzani.org

Willy Ronis Retrospective, Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan

WILLY RONIS - Retrospective 1926-1983
Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan
13 September - 31 November 1997

“Geometries modulated by the heart” produced “during free excursions, with no specific goal, on the edge of chance”.

This is the story in images (149) of Willy Ronis, photographer and poet, sentimental walker from the Thirties to the Eighties, whose photographs, the product of an unconscious process, approach “automatic writing”.

Affected by events in history in his time – he was born in 1910 – and the changes and upheavals resulting from the popular front, and then war, Ronis always maintains a modest distance from man and his environment in order to find a poetry that is not immediately apparent.

He comments: “This activity involves a lot of risk, not physical risk – for I rarely cover distant places – but risk of failure.

While on some days subjects are served up to us as if on a plate, on other days we don’t see anything, not because there is nothing to see, but because we do not see what is clearly there. This is why the enterprises is rarely fun; it demands concentration, and therefore solitude, and is, at least as far as I am concerned, founded on rejection of the picturesque, the exceptional”.

A humanist photographer and a “polygraph”, as he liked to call himself, Willy Ronis worked in a variety of different areas: reporting, illustration, fashion, teaching, and was involved in many image-related professions.

In this exhibition focusing on people, he portrays a variety of subjects: Paris in the ’40s and its post-war people; nudes and public scenes; children’s games and young brides and grooms; Marie-Anne, the love of his whole life, and famous people (Sartre, Picasso, etc…). His snapshots are tender, funny or serious, expressing his bewildered search for communion with human beings. “Where does it fit in, the search, the truth? In the familiar, the universal dimension. Not in that which surprises us, but in that which moves us”.

Galleria Carla Sozzani
Corso Como 10 – 20154 Milano, Italia
www.galleriacarlasozzani.org

Helmut Newton, Polaroids, Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan

HELMUT NEWTON
Impressions
Polaroids
Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan
3 October - 10 November 1996

Polaroids. Helmut Newton exhibits his unseen Polaroids to the public for the first time. Taken during a number of sessions since 1989, these are quick snapshots that strike us with immediacy. The polaroid is a technical medium quite congenial to the artist because, as he says, “I’m impatient to see what my photo will look like: I grab the camera […] and simply press the button.” The speed of this photographic process allows him to capture a situation, an expression, a momentary sensation that would lose its spontaneity and freshness with a slower technique, at the same speed as the human eye.

Impressions. 30 ink prints measuring 1.20 m long or high, depending whether the image is horizontal or vertical. None of them has ever been published or exhibited before. They were printed by Helmut Newton by putting together various works of his from different times in his archives in Monte Carlo. Newton says that this project, which began on August 19 and was completed on September 20, 1996, is his most innovative work. They are “impressions” inspired by the quick-fire language of the sexy and sometimes pornographic writing in magazines such as “True Crime” and “True Detective”, or the novels of Chandler and Spillane, whom Helmut Newton admires greatly.

Torsos 1994, 6 silver gelatine prints measuring 1.20 x 1.20 m, exhibited for the first time in Italy. They are imposing nudes inspired by the classical statuary of antiquity and Delamare’s sculptures of the Thirties, full-scale black and white photographs taken in the Nineties featuring bold angles and rigorously white backgrounds that emphasise the clear chiaroscuro of the bodies. In the same room we may admire 2 nude portraits of Kristen McMenamy measuring 1.50 x 1.20 m, which Helmut Newton printed for the first time for this exhibition in Milan.

HELMUT NEWTON

Helmut Newton was born in Berlin in 1920. At the age of 16 he was apprenticed to famous Berlin photographer Yva, renowned for his fashion photos, portraits and nudes. In 1938 he left Germany to live in Singapore, where he worked for the Singapore Straits Times. He then moved to Australia, where he met June Brown: wife, friend, lover, inseparable advisor. They settled in Paris in 1957. In the Sixties and Seventies Newton worked for Nova, Queen and Stern as well as for the French, American, Italian and British editions of Vogue magazine. He held his first solo show in Paris in 1975. He has been presented with numerous awards: the 1976 Art Directors Club of Tokyo award for best photograph of the year and, in 1977-1978, the American Institute of Graphic Arts award for his first book, White Women. In 1978-1979 he was presented with a gold medal by the Art Directors Club of Germany for best news photograph. In 1981 he moved to Monte Carlo. In 1989 he was appointed “Knight of arts and letters” by the French Minister of Culture Jack Lang. In the same year he also received the “Photographers’ Award for Outstanding Achievements and Contributions to Photography During the Sixties and Seventies” from the Photographic Society of Japan. French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac presented him with the “Gran Prix National de la Ville de Paris.” In 1991 he was awarded the “World Image Award” in New York for best photographic portrait, and the following year the German government presented him with a prize and he was appointed “Knight of arts, letters and sciences” by Princess Caroline of Monaco. He has held exhibitions all over the world. He now lives and works in Monte Carlo and Los Angeles. Few famous people today have not been immortalised by his ironic, talented lens: from Catherine Deneuve to Elisabeth Taylor, from Mick Jagger to Jack Nicholson, from Paloma Picasso to Charlotte Rampling. But it is above all his monumental black and white nudes that strike the collective imagination and present a new image of woman that has emerged since the Eighties: cold and confident, dedicated to the cult of the body and aware of her erotic impact. In these shocking images of athletes and amazons we find both the expressive power of the cinema and a decadent opulence bounding upon fetishism, an aggressive and transgressive imagination, a surprising and unmatched elegance. His most famous photographs are marked by the most explicit and the most ambiguous sexuality. Galleria Carla Sozzani presented a series of his portraits of women in 1993 (January 14 to February 27).

Galleria Carla Sozzani
Corso Como 10 - 20154 Milano, Italia
www.galleriacarlasozzani.org