My name is style. Gian Paolo Barbieri, Lucien Clergue, Greg Gorman, William Klein, Amedeo Turello

From November 18th 2017 to February 10th 2018, 29 ARTS IN PROGRESS gallery di Milano (via San Vittore 13) hosts the exhibition MY NAME IS STYLE, drawing together the works of five unique masters of photography: Gian Paolo Barbieri, Lucien Clergue, Greg Gorman, William Klein, Amedeo Turello.
29 ARTS IN PROGRESS gallery presents a new exhibition format that will henceforth be suggested every year within Photo Vogue Festival and that will open a debate between some of the most sought after speakers in the photographic community. This project will give the audience a rather unexpected insight among the manifold ways in which contemporary style has been developing through photography.
The exhibition will encompass intense and powerful portraits alongside classical everlasting nudes: an outstanding selection of photos that forever marked the stylistic zeitgeist of the 20th century and still inspires nowadays whole generations of both photographers and artists tout court. Not only historic, “charged” images – cornerstone in the development of a well-defined style – but also aesthetical quintessence and heart of beauty.
Gian Paolo Barbieri (Milan, 1938), Italian photographer eclectically and widely active in the international fashion scene, was able to represent the heart of fashion photography in all its most distinctive facets: from seduction to provocation and from myth to elegance. His shots are simultaneously magic and fantastic, dream-like and playful, ironic and theatrical. The two- dimensional flat surface of the photo becomes an “object of desire” itself by luring the viewer’s imagination in a complex realm of signs and symbols to decipher.
Lucien Clergue (Arles, 1934 - Nîmes, 2014) re-elaborated the feminine nude, working extensively on chiaroscuro, so as to obtain a classical kind of sculptural geometry. Most celebrated are – in the framework of his wide-ranging career – the so-called Nu Zébré series, where bodies are formally dissected yet enhanced by the progressive movement of graceful parallel lines created by lights and shades neatly “carved” onto the skin by venetian blinds. He was the founder, in 1969, of the well-known “Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie” of Arles.
Greg Gorman (Kansas City, 1949), one of the most famous speaker in the modern photographic portraiture, presents a selection of refined shots characterized by a mise-en-scene studied down to the smallest detail - from the setting to the pose, from the facial expression to the highlighting of muscle mass, from the actual camera angle to the skillful touches that so enhance the pathos of the image. These sharp and non-conformist images give us all the savor of that complicity which has been created between subject and photographer.
William Klein (New York, 1928), mainly known for his ironic approach to the medium and the extensive use of rather unusual photographic techniques in photojournalism and fashion photography, is the bold author of a series of both black and white and color campaigns for Vogue. The Professional Photographer Magazine placed him 25th among the most influential one hundred photographers of all time. Pushed to the extreme, his photos result from virtuosistic visual exercises where his fine arts expertise led him to question and redraw the traditional boundaries of photography.
Amedeo Turello (Cuneo, 1964), one of the most celebrated fashion photographer of our days, succeeded in shooting famous faces such as Naomi Campbell, Valeria Mazza, Dita von Teese and many others. Turello knows that the truth is found above appearance. He knows that appearance is not as superficial as it seems and, upon closer inspection, will reveal an unsuspecting depth. It is hard not to be captivated by his women, never fully clothed, never fully naked, thereby rendered to a kind of subtle truth. 

Opening: Friday 17th November, from 6 PM   

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