Le monde selon Penn

Bourse de commerce - Pinault Collection

From the 1940s to the early 2000s, “Le monde selon Penn” traces Irving Penn's career in Galerie 2 through an exceptional group of photographs from the Collection Pinault. As part of the exhibition “Remember Me”, Galerie 2 brings together nearly 450 photographs by Irving Penn from the Collection Pinault. In an unprecedented configuration, the installation “Le monde selon Penn” offers a rare opportunity to take in the full breadth of a body of work produced between the 1940s and the early 2000s. Irving Penn (1917-2009), a major American photographer of the 20th century, is recognized for having profoundly renewed fashion photography and portraiture by imposing a sober, direct and timeless aesthetic. Rather than a chronological or strictly thematic approach, this is an immersion at the heart of the artist's visual universe, where portraits of personalities, fashion photographs, ethnographic reportage, nude studies, still lifes and floral compositions freely converse with one another. These juxtapositions reveal the constants of his work: the rigor of composition, attention to materials, a taste for simplicity, as well as a unique ability to capture human presence and the beauty of the simplest forms. The celebrated Corner Portraits sit alongside cigarettes, wilted flowers and fashion silhouettes, forming a vast visual mosaic that invites visitors to enter Irving Penn's mental studio. Through this unprecedented installation, the coherence and modernity of a body of work that never ceased to redefine the possibilities of photography and our way of looking at the world are revealed. Perfectionist, humanist and eclectic. This is how one might describe, if one had to sum them up, the work and the immense photographic career of Irving Penn. Irving Penn was above all a studio photographer. The “neutral zone” that he methodically devised there using a simple canvas backdrop or white paper bathed in natural light defines a decontextualizing spatial framework that at the same time highlights the physical presence of his many subjects. This working principle, of great modesty in its execution, would follow him throughout his career. Constituting an invaluable legacy for the world of photography, Irving Penn's work is represented within the Collection Pinault by a significant body of his images, already made visible in 2014-2015 on the occasion of the monographic exhibition “Irving Penn, Resonance” at the Palazzo Grassi, in Venise. Curatorship: Matthieu Humery, photography advisor to the Collection Pinault, with the collaboration of Lola Regard, project manager.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗