Bob Colacello It Just Happened

Ivorypress presents bob colacello It Just Happened

Exhibition: open by appointment only Online conversation: Elena Foster with Bob Colacello. 19 November 7 p.m. CET Venue: Ivorypress, Aviador Zorita 48 Madrid Spain

On 19 November 2020 Ivorypress will present the exhibition It Just Happened, by the American photographer and writer Bob Colacello. The show will include eighty-five photographs, most of them vintage. Letters, magazines and memorabilia will be exhibited along with the photographs as complementary documentation.

Colacello was editor of Interview magazine between 1971 and 1983 and Andy Warhol’s right-hand. In It Just Happened, he shares photos from his personal album taken between the late seventies and early eighties, bringing alive an intimate and faithful chronicle of the fascinating social circle around the so- called Pope of Pop.

On one of his many travels with Warhol, Colacello acquired a Minox—a tiny camera said to have been used by spies during the Cold War era. From that moment on, he carried this pocket camera with him to numerous jet-set parties, dinners and weddings, at such emblematic settings as the Factory, Studio 54 and presidential inaugurations at the White House. © Bob Colacello 2020. Andy & Joseph Beyus, Naples, 1980

Barbara Allen, Thomas Ammann, Joseph Beuys, Peter Beard, Larry Rivers, Bianca Jagger, Robert Mapplethorpe, George Hamilton, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Cher, Truman Capote, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mick Jagger, Paul Morrissey, Paloma Picasso, Audrey Hepburn, Robert Wilson, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Jean Pigozzi, Lord George Weidenfeld, Jamie Wyeth and Raquel Welch are just a few of the icons that make up the select cast in Colacello’s photographs. This body of work captures like no other both the privacy of places where access to paparazzi was restricted and the freedom of the time.

These ‘stolen’ snapshots, with unexpected frames and overexposed lighting, demonstrate Colacello’s rebellious spirit and impudence against photography’s formal conventions of symmetry, exposure and balance. It is in this subversive attitude and irrepressible rhythm where the photographer’s contribution lies: the construction of a new aesthetic identity within the photojournalistic genre of the seventies and eighties.

On the occasion of the exhibition, Ivorypress is publishing a book with the same title. Conceived as a photographic album, the publication presents Colacello’s photographs chronologically, accompanied by captions handwritten by the photographer, explaining and contextualising the images. This book is part of the Ivorypress Archives series, which aims to make unpublished and long-lost material available to the general public.

The exhibition and book will launch on 19 November with an online conversation between Elena Foster and Bob Colacello and a virtual tour through the exhibition. The show will be open by appointment only and, depending on how the COVID-19 situation evolves, a closing event with the presence of the artist will be held at Ivorypress Madrid in the following months. © Bob Colacello 2020. Andy with Truman Capote, Southampton, 1979 © Bob Colacello 2020. Thomas Ammann, Moynihan, and Suzie Frankfurt, Manhasset, 1981

Bob Colacello (b. 1947) was born in Brooklyn and raised in Long Island, New York. In 1969, he graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and two years later completed an MFA in Film at Columbia University School of the Arts. He was the editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and then worked for Vanity Fair until 2017, writing profiles and investigative pieces on cultural, social and political subjects. His memoir Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (1990) was acclaimed by The New York Times as ‘the best-written and the most killingly observed’ book on Warhol’s inner circle. He has had solo exhibitions at Vito Schnabel Gallery, St Moritz; Vito Schnabel Projects, New York; Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Govinda Gallery, Washington D.C.; Steven Kasher Gallery, New York; and the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida. Colacello’s photographs have been included in group exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; MoMA PS1, New York; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; and Museu Serralves, Porto.

For further information and interview requests: Santiago Riveiro Ivorypress T: +34 91 449 09 61 [email protected] www.ivorypress.com