Press Release:

Thirty-four artworks on display retrace the whole production of the great American artist, starting from the Eighties, when he walks away from magazines and advertising to approach the arts, up to his most recent works. 

LaChapelle’s works are made of Hawaiian atmospheres, unexpected landscapes, mythological figures and dreamy suggestions, in an exhibition that proceeds backwards. From his latest pieces, New World, Lost and Found e Behold, evocative photos taken in 2017 in the pristine Hawaiian rainforest, dense with mysticism and spirituality, to the less recent, realized in Los Angeles. Such as the two big panels from the series Aristocracy (2014), the monumental Black Friday at mall of the Apocalypse (2013), the Kardashian family’s famous Christmas picture, Landscape, the floral Earth Laughs in Flowers, and Rape of Africa (2009), a provocative work against the violence suffered by the African continent, which gives the title to the homonymous project presented in 2008.

2007 was the turning point for LaChapelle’s production, creating the series The deluge and After the deluge, inspired by the vision of the Sistine Chapel. The reference to Michelangelo’s masterpiece is mixed with consumer society’s brands , generating an apocalyptic vision with a finale where objects, artworks and people appear flooded, like in Cathedral, Statue e Awakened.

Closing the exhibition, there is the series of images realized between 1984 and 2009, which shows the star system. Like the three portraits of Michael Jackson celebrating his beatification by the media, Faye Dunaway in Day of the Locust (1996), Dynamic Nude and the only black and white image shot in New York: Good News for Modern Man del 1984.

With the occasion a book with the images from the exhibition will be published, edited by Carlo Cambi Editore.

David LaChapelle is today one of the most acknowledged and appreciated artist in the world. Born in Fairfield in 1963, he married a post-Pop and - for some aspects – surrealist style that makes him unique. David LaChapelle’s artworks are part of numerous important international collections, both public and private, and exhibited in various museums, among which the Musée d’Orsay of Paris, the Brooklyn Museum of New York, the Museum of contemporary Art of Taipei, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Tel Aviv, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in Los Angeles, The National Portrait Gallery of London, the Fotographfiska Museet of Stockholm and The National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. David LaChapelle lives and works between Los Angeles and the Hawaiian island Maui.

Galleria Mucciaccia, Largo della Fontanella Borghese 89, Rome 
Opening 18th of April –July 9, 2019

T. +39 06 69923801
segreteria@galleriamucciaccia.it 
WWW.GALLERIAMUCCIACCIA.COM.