As part of the exhibition "Remember Me", Gallery 2 brings together nearly 450 photographs by Irving Penn from the Pinault Collection. In an unprecedented configuration, the installation "Le monde selon Penn" offers a rare opportunity to take in the vastness 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 recognised for having profoundly renewed fashion photography and portraiture by imposing an aesthetic that is sober, direct and timeless. Rather than a chronological or strictly thematic route, this is an immersion into the heart of the artist's visual universe, where portraits of personalities, fashion photographs, ethnographic reportage, studies of nudes, still lifes and floral compositions converse freely with one another. These juxtapositions reveal the constants of his work: the rigour of composition, attention to materials, a taste for spareness, as well as a unique capacity to capture human presence and the beauty of the simplest forms. The famous Corner Portraits rub shoulders with cigarettes, faded flowers and fashion silhouettes, forming a vast visual mosaic that invites visitors to enter the mental workshop of Irving Penn. 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 it had to be summed up, the work and immense photographic career of Irving Penn. Irving Penn is above all a studio photographer. The "neutral zone" he methodically creates there, using a simple backdrop of white canvas or paper bathed in natural light, defines a decontextualising spatial frame that at once highlights the physical presence of his many subjects. This working principle, of great modesty in its execution, stayed with him throughout his career.
Constituting an invaluable legacy for the world of photography, the work of Irving Penn is represented within the Pinault Collection by a significant holding of his images, already shown in 2014-2015 on the occasion of the monographic exhibition "Irving Penn, Resonance" at Palazzo Grassi, in Venice.
Curation: Matthieu Humery, photography adviser to the Pinault Collection, with the collaboration of Lola Regard, project manager.