The Tel Aviv Museum of Art presents a selection from the works of provocative photographer David LaChapelle (b. Connecticut, 1963), exhibited in Israel for the first time, giving a comprehensive view of his unique and daring style of the past twenty years. Exhibition open Friday 23 July 2010 Saturday 23 October 2010.
Alongside familiar subversive photographs originally commissioned for fashion and celebrity editorials, the show explores LaChapelle’s personal projects, created recently as part of his artistic and critical expression. Here he seeks to juxtapose contrasting concepts through their visual representation: hope and despair, growth and devastation, renewal and degeneration.
He creates uncommon combinations, surprisingly mixing familiar symbols with anonymous models, creating oxymoronic pictures of the beauty of destruction and the glamour of disaster. The photographs are often laden with symbols and metaphors—from devout Christian iconography through the blunt pornography of overdoses and street gangs.
LaChapelle takes the photographed image to the extreme of a blunt cliché, which almost collapses into a perfect grotesque due to the redundant color and exaggerated processing; surprisingly, beyond the excess, human gestures and unexpected vulnerability are revealed.
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art is Israel’s leading museum of modern and contemporary art, and home to one of the world’s largest collections of Israeli art. Since its founding in 1932, the Museum has served as one of Tel Aviv’s major cultural hubs, displaying a vibrant mix of permanent collections and temporary exhibitions in a wide variety of fields – painting, sculpture, prints and drawings, photography, video, architecture and design. Each year, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art welcomes more than 500,000 visitors, offering them over twenty annual Israeli and international art exhibitions.
www.tamuseum.com