David LaChapelle. Lost+Found

Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice hosts from 12 April to 10 September 2017, the surreal, baroque, and pop universe of David LaChapelle, one of the most important and irreverent contemporary photographers.

The exhibition, curated by Reiner Opoku and Denis Curti, and organised by the Fondazione di Venezia and Civita Tre Venezie, will be presenting more than 100 images that follow the career of this American artist, from his early projects in black and white from the 1990s to the more recent works in colour, works which have largely become iconic and which have guaranteed him international recognition by both critics and the public.

The exhibition, the first solo show by LaChapelle to be held in Venice, proposes a great novelty: the world premiere of New World, a new series made over the past four years. It consists of 11 photographs that mark the artist’s return to the human figure and that are centred on such ideas as paradise and the representations of joy, nature, and the soul.

The exhibition layout starts from the 1990s, when Andy Warhol offered him his first professional photographic assignment for Interview magazine. It was in this period that LaChapelle pondered on the communicative and promotional possibilities of the press, possibilities closely linked to Pop Art.
His photos denounce contemporary obsessions, the relationship with pleasure, affluence, the superfluous, and the unbounded need to make an impression. And he wraps everything in electric colours and lacquered surfaces, all characterised by the recurrent presence of a brazen and aggressive nudity.