Exhibition
Miles Aldridge. ART HISTORY
7 Apr 2018 – 22 May 2018
Event times
Tuesday – Saturday
11 am – 6 pm
Address
- Weteringschans 79 A
- Amsterdam
North Holland - 1017
- Netherlands
Reflex Gallery is excited to present a collection of his recent work in a show entitled ART HISTORY – a chance to see Aldridge’s response to the artists who have inspired him and shaped his visual idiom.
About
The globally renowned photographer and artist, Miles Aldridge, is celebrated for his chromatically daring, highly finished works, which recall the glamour of cinema, the charge of the femme fatale set in the trappings of modern life. One of the world’s most inspiring image-makers, Aldridge combines a meticulous approach and a rare flair for drama and narrative.
Aldridge, born in London in 1964, studied at Central St Martins School of Art and spent days wandering around the National Gallery, sketching. It was there that he fell for the work of the Northern Renaissance artists Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Durer.
“Lucretia”, after Lucas Cranach, is a chromogenic print showing a model posed as the classic figure of Lucretia, swathed in velvet, poised to pierce her chest with a dagger. It is a penetrating image with striking emotive impact. While referencing a historical figure, Aldridge has said that Lucretia is essentially “still the same strong woman” as those immortalised in his iconic images of housewives and Madonnas: “These are all women who hold all the cards. She is always the hero of her own biography.”
A chromogenic print of Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams references both Dürer and Holbein in its pose and palate, while Still Life #1 in which a skull is poised on a tablecloth set against a richly hued backdrop is both a memento mori in the art historical tradition and a look forward to the expressionism of Otto Dix and the German Expressionists with a nod to Warhol.
As part of ART HISTORY, Reflex will also exhibit works from Aldridge’s extraordinary recent collaborations – with the artists Gilbert & George, Maurizio Cattelan and Harland Miller.
His Gilbert & George series, featuring the two artists in and around their East London home, represents Aldridge’s first foray into the process of photogravure. It is, he insists, a resolutely anti-digital process, and one that feels fitting for the work of Gilbert & George themselves. “It is a conscious departure back to
analogue,” Aldridge explains. “It got me surprised and excited about image-making all over again.”
