David LaChapelle is a celebrated American photographer and video artist who has been called the ‘Fellini of photography’ and the ‘Salvador Dali of the third millennium.’ American Photo magazine recently listed him as one of the 10 most important people in photography. The photographer has come to epitomise such trends as pop surrealism and surrealist glamour. David LaChapelle’s work became a classic of photography during his lifetime – there is no photographer working today more recognisable than David LaChapelle.
LaChapelle’s photographs have appeared on the covers and inside magazines VOGUE Italia, VOGUE Paris, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, i-D, Vibe, Interview, The Face, British GQ, Playboy and others. He has shot advertising campaigns for clients such as L’Oreal, MTV, Ecko, Diesel Jeans, Levi’s, Ford and Kenzo. His work has been featured on album covers for artists such as Moby, No Doubt, Whitney Houston, Lil’ Kim, Elton John and Madonna.
David LaChapelle’s photographs are part of the permanent collections of the National Portrait Galleries of London and Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles Museum of Art, and others. Solo exhibitions of his work have opened worldwide, including at the Groningen Museum (Netherlands), Casa dei Tre Ochi (Venice, Italy), Beaux-Arts Mons (Mons, Belgium), the Palazzo dell’Exposition (Rome, Italy), Hangaram Design Museum (Seoul, South Korea), the Hundertwasser Museum (Vienna, Austria), the Paris Mint, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Fine Arts. Most recently, LaChapelle’s solo retrospective opened at Fotografiska New York – the first time the museum has dedicated its entire three-storey exhibition space to a single artist. LaChapelle has published more than a dozen books of his work, most recently Lost + Found Part I and Good News Part II (Taschen, 2017).
LaChapelle’s work is an example of amazing fashion photographs, taken with amazing imagination. They are characterised by freedom, lightness, strangeness and uniqueness. At the pop-up exhibition, Galerie Lumiere will present photographs from LaChapelle’s most colourful and epathetic period – the late 1990s and early 2000s. The exhibition will include such works from this period as ‘Angelina Jolie: Lusty Spring’, ‘Naomi Campbell: Bon Apetit’, ‘Pamela Anderson: Over Easy’ and others. In addition to fashion portraits of celebrities, the exhibition will feature works from the Scarface series, inspired by the gangster film of the same name starring Al Pacino, and works from The House at the End of the World series, made for Vogue Italia and representing the contrast between beauty and destruction, reminiscent of the biggest hurricanes in American history. The exhibition will also include the 2007 work ‘Statue, Los Angeles’ from the series ‘After the Flood’, a period when LaChapelle became interested in new subjects and began to take more inspiration from religious motifs and use them in his work than before.
