This exhibition – an anthology of one hundred and thirty photographs illustrating his work in recent years – includes grotesque and sensual images loaded with “an eroticism packed with humour which” – as he says- “I inherited from my mother, a beautiful woman who laughed about the many men who courted her”. And in fact it was his mother Helga, a homemaker and amateur photographer, who first inspired David LaChapelle’s art.
His made-up images, grotesque and impossible, and superbly fascinating, with their violent colours and their content and representations bounding on the outrageous are a mirror of our times: vulgar, chaotic, crowded, bold, hedonistic and vacant. As LaChapelle says: “My favourite scenarios are McDonald’s and cheap cars.” A sentence that may appear banal, but reveals the consciousness and merciless analysis of an artist who is a genius of his times.
This exhibition – an anthology of one hundred and thirty photographs illustrating his work in recent years – includes grotesque and sensual images loaded with “an eroticism packed with humour which” – as he says- “I inherited from my mother, a beautiful woman who laughed about the many men who courted her”. And in fact it was his mother Helga, a homemaker and amateur photographer, who first inspired David LaChapelle’s art.
His made-up images, grotesque and impossible, and superbly fascinating, with their violent colours and their content and representations bounding on the outrageous are a mirror of our times: vulgar, chaotic, crowded, bold, hedonistic and vacant. As LaChapelle says: “My favourite scenarios are McDonald’s and cheap cars.” A sentence that may appear banal, but reveals the consciousness and merciless analysis of an artist who is a genius of his times.