Yvon Lambert New York, (550 West 21st Street)
550 West 21st Street, 212-242-3611
Chelsea
July 10 - August 21, 2007
Web Site
YVON LAMBERT NEW YORK is pleased to announce the exhibition, At Home, a selection of works chosen and installed by Mario Testino, as well as a series of new works by Idris Khan specially commissioned by Testino for this show. The exhibition opens Tuesday, July 10th and runs through Tuesday, August 21st, 2007.
Mario Testino, best known as a fashion photographer, is also a respected art collector, art collaborator and tastemaker. He began collecting contemporary art in the early ‘90s, and from the beginning was interested in seeking out the new. He has also participated on collaborations with the likes of Jim Lambie, Angus Fairhurst, Karen Kilimnik, Ugo Rondinone and Nigel Cooke.
At Home will not only showcase the talents of artists such as John Stezaker, Glenn Ligon, Anne Collier, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nicola Tyson, and Anselm Reyle, as chosen by someone with a unique understanding of imagery, but will be a special installation by Mario Testino focusing not merely on art as something to look at, but how we look at it—and, moreover, how we live with it. It is an examination, both playful and serious, of paintings as decoration, as well as works of art, valued for their form and color as much as their content and authorship. Testino will transform the gallery into his ideal showcase: not a blank space where a painting becomes a fetishized object away from the context of everyday life, but a drawing room in which each painting has to survive and flourish as part of a rich community, allowing us to examine how works of art inform each other and their surroundings as well as ourselves.
Mario Testino is a photographer who has built his career on discovery and transformation, constantly redefining the boundaries of commercial photography. His Gucci campaign in the mid-1990s heralded a sea change in fashion in the broadest sense, instantly ending the international trend for grunge, and inspiring a new celebration of luxury and sexuality. Likewise his portraits of Princess Diana, both intimate and instantly iconic, redefined our collective notions of a Princess. In 2002 his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London (it has since traveled around the world), which attracted more visitors to the museum than any other in its history.
Idris Khan’s work is an enigmatic play of appropriation and re-creation. Combining analog and digital photographic techniques, his works possess characteristics more akin to drawing or painting, animated by the accumulative intervention of the artist’s hand. For At Home Khan will use photographs taken by Mario Testino of artists’ studios, of Testino at work, and of architectural spaces and interiors. Staying away from the fashion photography Testino is known for, Khan has delved into more personal snapshots, picking up on images that have never been seen in magazines or books, to create three dark and haunting images that highlight photography’s own melancholic existence as a medium, one that at times collects disregarded memories.
Idris Khan was born in Birmingham, England in 1978 and now lives and works in London. He received his MA in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art in 2004 and has since been included in major group shows ‘Contemporary Photography and the archive’ at SFMOMA and the traveling group show ‘Regeneration 50 Photographers of Tomorrow’ organized by the Musée de l’Elysee in Switzerland. Solo exhibitions include shows at Victoria Miro Gallery in London (2006) and Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco (2006). He will present solo exhibitions at Yvon Lambert New York this October and at Magasin 3, Stockholm in 2008.