David LaChapelle
Maschio Angioino
Napoli
Castel Nuovo
08 DEC 2021 / 06 MARCH 2022
From the official press release:
A special exhibition is soon to be hosted in Napoli, with a site-specific installation of work by American artist, David LaChapelle, at Maschio Angioino. “David LaChapelle” invites visitors to experience highlights from the prolific artist's career in an intimate survey curated by Mario Martin and Vittoria Mainoldi.
This new exhibition offers over 40 significant pieces from various periods of the artist’s image-making career, from the 1980- present. Selections of unseen photography from the artist’s archive are presented along with iconic masterworks and several new premieres. “David LaChapelle” in Napoli explores LaChapelle’s profound representation of humanity in this special time we live in. A thought-provoking point of view is represented in this survey and presents the important works which contribute to LaChapelle’s role among the world’s most influential artists.
Fully aware of the creative artifice, LaChapelle’s images are distinguished by their ability to relate and dialogue with the manifestations of western civilization over vast themes, from the classical renaissance to present day, and beyond. Through his evolving style, LaChapelle’s body of work communicates the fears, obsessions, and desires of our contemporary society that increasingly elude easy categorization.
Not to be missed are seminal works Deluge (2007), in which LaChapelle re-imagines a bible flood, set in Las Vegas, while contemporizing Michelangelo’s 16th-century mural from the Sistine Chapel and Rape of Africa (2009) which finds Naomi Campbell as Venus in a Botticelli-inspired scene set in the gold mine fields of Africa. Also planned for display are selections from the vivid and exciting series Land SCAPE (2013), and Gas (2013), still-life projects where LaChapelle assembles found objects to create oil refineries and their interdependent gas stations before presenting them as relics in an earth reclaimed by nature.
Unique to Napoli, this new survey or work presents some of LaChapelle’s most personal hand-painted photographic negatives, created in the 1980’s, as the teenage artist explored ideas of the metaphysical and loss against the backdrop of the devastating AIDS epidemic. These delicate works will be mirrored with selections of the artist’s newest works, in which he returns to his early photographic techniques while following an awe for the sublime and a quest for spirituality, as can be seen in Behold (2017).
Please visit the official exhibition website here for tickets and more information.