WILLIAM KLEIN
"CHANTILLONS"

Exhibition: 8 September – 15 October, 2016
Opening: Thursday, 8 September, 19:30-21h

For over six decades William Klein has pursued a creative life all his own. He has learned on the job with next to no formal training, making innovative and influential work in photography, painting, graphic design, writing, television and film. His sensibility is distinctive, while his achievements are unparalleled and unlikely to be matched. He began in the late 1940s with figurative and abstract canvases of the great graphic flair. He reinvented twosupposedly antagonistic fields : fashion photography and documentary photography. And for the screen he has made more than twenty groundbreaking documentaries, over two hundred commercials and a handful of wildly iconoclastic fiction films.

A selection of 38 images will be on display at Espace 2 of the gallery with a focus on fashion photography and of images shot in New York, Paris, Moscow, Rome and Tokyo. "As a New York-born resident of Paris he somehow created a highly productive kind of exile, pitched between two cultures, adhering to neither. The urge to see and engage with societies around the world has also kept him rootless. This limbo has been vital to his art but it has vexed critics and commentators. His audience is comprised of various pockets. Those who know Klein the photographer are rarely aware of his films and vice versa. Nevertheless the things he produced in his first decade as an artist contain the seeds." (David Campany)