Press Release / PETER LINDBERGH from FASHION to REALITY April 13 – August 27, 2017
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Press Release / PETER LINDBERGH FROM FASHION TO REALITY April 13 – August 27, 2017 Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung Theatinerstrasse 8 | 80333 Munich T +49 (0)89 / 22 44 12 | [email protected] www.kunsthalle-muc.de/en THE KUNSTHALLE MUNICH PRESENTS A MAJOR EXHIBITION ON PETER LINDBERGH This spectacular exhibition about German photographer Peter Lindbergh (born 1944 in Lissa), one of the most inluential fashion photographers of the past forty years, features more than 220 photographs. His iconic images, with which he heralded the supermodel phenomenon in the 1990s, will be presented along with unpublished photographs and unseen material, varying from personal notes, storyboards, props, polaroids, contact sheets and ilms to monumental prints. His avant-garde images quickly addressed concerns of society in a world with established aesthetic codes: his pure black-and-white photographs have determined the course of fashion photography since the early 1980s. Lindbergh’s predominantly black and white photographs that capture the leeting moment opened up a new dimension of realism in fashion photography, revolutionizing the visual idiom of the well-known magazines and fashion labels. Avoiding the artiice of fashion photography, Lindbergh was the irst to focus on the unique personalities of his models. Instead of beautifully dressed human “clothes horses”, he portrayed self-assured, expressive personas, from the femme fatale to the heroine, but also the female dancer and the actress. His oeuvre is characterized by portraits that radiate a certain lack of inhibition and physical grace. Curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot – who previously presented “Jean Paul Gaultier. From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk” at the Kunsthalle Munich – explains: “This exhibition is not a chronological survey, but a narrative in which you discover the universe of Peter Lindbergh through his unique eye, his strong themes and his collaborations with artists like Pina Bausch and Jenny Holzer. It also reveals the humanism found in his work, seen in a social context. It says a lot about his own values, his vision on ageism, beauty and femininity, on social issues and reveals the boundless creativity and imagination found in his photographs.” ABOUT THE EXHIBITION The exhibition “From Fashion to Reality” is an homage to Lindbergh’s multifaceted oeuvre from 1978 to the present day. The show has a thematic approach, marking his creative development and focusing on the passions he developed over the years. Eight different sections have been devised: “Supermodels”, “Couturiers”, “Zeitgeist”, “Dance”, “The Darkroom”, “The Unknown”, “Silver Screen” and “Icons” SUPERMODELS Models like Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Kate Moss, Christy Turlington and Tatjana Patitz, among others, were young and unknown when Lindbergh photographed them in the late 1970s and 1980s. Later, their irst names became household names that rolled off tongues the world over. While the focus of inluential fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue had hitherto been on the clothes, the spotlight was now being shone onto the women presenting them. This section shows Lindbergh’s iconic pictures from the 1990s and is complemented with photographs from the recent reunion of the supermodels (published in Vogue Italia, september 2015). Lindbergh shows that twenty-ive years later, they have not lost any of their beauty and personality. COUTURIERS In 1978, Stern commissioned Lindbergh to shoot renowned couturiers like Yves Saint Laurent and hip young designers like Giorgio Armani or Thierry Mugler. From then on, he increasingly collaborated with the big names of the fashion world – German icons Karl Lagerfeld, Jil Sander, Thomas Maier, but also Azzedine Alaïa, Jean Paul Gaultier or Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Lindbergh managed to disrupt the ixed codes of the fashion industry and made a reputation for their brands. His collaborations with twenty-ive fashion designers from various eras and the way in which Lindbergh helped shape the image of fashion houses is amply covered in the section “Couturiers”. DANCE Frequently Lindbergh combined fashion photography with his passion for dance, one of his major sources of inspiration. He worked on a visual history of dance with series of photographs based on famous dancers and choreographers, such as Sergei Diaghilev or Georges Balanchine, Spanish dancer and choreographer Blanca Li and companies like the Bolshoi, Berlin’s Staatsballett and the New York City Ballet. He also made a ilm called Pina Bausch. Der Fensterputzer (2001), on his late friend Pina Bausch, and portrayed Madonna dressed by Japanese designers in a tribute to the great American choreographer Martha Graham. ZEITGEIST With his humanist approach and his play on masculinity and femininity, Lindbergh subverted the fashion industry’s rigid conventions. Gender issues and political statements are the subject in the “Zeitgeist”- section. A series called “Give peace a Chance” shows the models in an anti-war- demonstration-set that he made for Harper’s Bazaar in 2004. Similarly, “A New Age” was shot for Italian Vogue in 2014, in close collaboration with American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer. Having drastically changed the standards of fashion photography in times of excessive retouching, Lindbergh chooses natural beauty, with as much emphasis on personality as on outward appearance – celebrating the elegance and sensuality of older women, like in his Pirelli-Calendar for 2017. In a 2014 interview, he declared that: “This should be the responsibility of photographers today: to free women, and inally everyone, from the terror of youth and perfection”, believing that there is something more than standards of beauty and youth that makes a person interesting. THE UNKNOWN Lindbergh was the irst to use fashion photography as a medium of storytelling. Often resembling ilm stills, the momentariness of his photographs encourages the beholder to spin the story behind the scene. “The Unknown” reveals Lindbergh’s fascination with science iction and includes his famous 1990 series featuring the Danish model Helena Christensen and the actress Debbie Lee Carrington, which many consider as the pioneering story of narratives in fashion magazines. SILVER SCREEN To some extent, Lindbergh’s stylistic inspiration has its roots in the esthetics of international avant- garde cinema from the 1920s to the 1950s: his settings are reminiscent of the engine room in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the cabaret in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel and the ilm sets of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds or Psycho. Moreover, time and again, he comes back to the raw industrial architecture that is familiar to him from a childhood and adolescence spent in Duisburg, creating an intriguing tension between the backdrop and his models. “Silver Screen” shows these ilmic inluences on Lindbergh’s work. ICONS Often referred to as the “Poet of Glamour” or “Photographer of Truth”, Lindbergh considers himself more anti-glamour, as he dismisses all notions of social status in his images. Erasing hierarchy in his pictures, he captures moments of truth, celebrating the natural beauty and elegance of the person in front of his camera. The “Icons” gallery is presented as a visual journey through four decades of timeless images. He captured iconic igures of pop culture, from Kate Winslet to Charlotte Rampling, from Eddie Redmayne to Christoph Waltz, from Tina Turner to Pharrell Williams, all with a powerful emotional appeal. LINDBERGH’S OEUVRE IN CONTEXT Since much of it is published in short- lived print media, like monthly fashion magazines, some of Lindbergh’s work has faded into obscurity, despite its historical signiicance. Other photographs have never been shown in public. For this exhibition, Lindbergh opened up the doors to his archive, granting curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot unlimited access. Taking images from this vast collection, Loriot has added making-of and behind-the-scenes material to Lindbergh’s oficial oeuvre, thereby providing fresh insight into the history of photography over the last few decades. Additionally, ilm excerpts and interviews with collaborators, models and actors throw light on the artist. Lindbergh’s Models. The Film (1991, 52 minutes) will be screened, as well as interviews with Grace Coddington, Nicole Kidman, Cindy Crawford and German supermodel Nadja Auermann, among others. ABOUT THE ARTIST Known for his memorable cinematic images, Peter Lindbergh is recognized as one of the most inluential contemporary photographers. Born in Lissa (present-day Poland, then occupied German territory) in 1944, he spent his childhood in Duisburg (North Rhine-Westphalia). He worked as a window dresser for a local department store and enrolled in the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1960s. He remembers these years: “I preferred actively seeking the inspirations of Van Gogh, my idol, rather than painting the mandatory portraits and landscapes taught in art schools... .” Inspired by the painter, he moved to Arles for almost a year, and then embarked on a journey hitchhiking through Spain and North Africa. He later studied free painting at the College of Art in Krefeld and was inluenced by Joseph Kosuth and the conceptual movement. Before graduating, he was invited to exhibit his work at the renowned avant-garde Galerie Denise René-Hans Mayer in 1969. After moving to Düsseldorf in 1971, he turned his attention to photography and worked for two years assisting German photographer Hans Lux, before opening his own studio in 1973. Becoming