David LaChapelle: Lost + Found

About

the exhibition, curated by Denis Curti and Reiner Opoku, organized by the Venice Foundation and Civita Tre Venezie, traces the American artist's career, from the early projects in black and white of the nineties up to the work, only in color, the most recent , works become largely iconic and that ensured international recognition from critics and audiences.

How big news, the show, first monographic LaChapelle in Venice, offers the world premiere of New World, a new series made over the last four years. There are 11 photographs that mark the return to the human figure and that revolve around themes like heaven and representations of joy, nature, soul.

The exhibition starts from the '90s, when Andy Warhol offered him his first professional photographic assignment for Interview magazine. His photographs denounce the contemporary obsessions, the relationship with the pleasure, with health, with the superfluous and an unbridled need to appear. The subjects are celebrities, from Michael Jackson to Hillary Clinton, Muhammad Ali Jeff Koons, Madonna, Uma Thurman, from Andy Warhol to David Bowie, whose images are used as a commodity produced in series, consciously sacrificed on the altar of system based on the icon.

The turning point that marks the transition to a new phase of his search for his artistic evolution is the journey to Rome in 2006. It is on this occasion that, by visiting the Sistine Chapel, is electrocuted by Michelangelo's frescoes and the pomp of power religious. Just the Flood Michelangelo suggested the creation of The Deluge (The Flood), in which the references to Michelangelo's masterpiece mingle with the consumer society and beauty brands paraded naked bodies. The exhibition continues with After the Deluge, photographs that show a reality where all the objects and symbols of today's world are submerged and Awakened, in which he portrays people immersed in water in an embryonic state, a sort of resurrection after the flood.

During his career, the American artist has certainly not overlooked the comparison with landscape photography. Ai Tre Oci displays some photographs from the cycle Gas Station and Land Scape, in which reconstructs models of oil facilities and gas stations to scale, through recycled materials, such as egg cartons, cards for computer motherboards, curlers, straws and more.