Giovanni Gastel
"Divine Ladies"

Exhibition: 25 January – 3 March, 2018
Vernissage: Thursday, 25 January 25, 6-8 p.m., in the presence of the artist

Giovanni Gastel was born in Milan 1955. Influenced by his uncle Luchino Visconti, the famous cinema and theater director, Gastel started showing his artistic vocation at the age of twelve, joining experimental acting companies. At the same time, he developed a passion for poetry and at sixteen, Cortina published his collection of poems named "Casbah". Between 1975 and 1976 he began producing still lives for Christie’s and formed the visual identity of several Italian companies.

From the early 1980s to today, Gastel has worked with more than 50 Italian and international magazines, and published about 130 covers for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Elle, Amica etc. He has produced over 500 campaigns and catalogs for several fashion houses, beauty brands, jewellers and designers. As an icon of the Italian and international photography world, he received the Oscar for photography "La Kore - Oscar della Moda" in 2002.

After 40 years devoted to his photographic research, he was honored with a major retrospective, curated by Germano Celant at the Palazzo della Ragione in Milan in 2016. The exhibition at Galerie Clairefontaine entitled "Divine Ladies", presents a selection of portraits and fashion pictures, which are a hymn to femininity, style, elegance, and to a world made of subtle seduction, sensitivity and hidden fragility, - his main sources of inspiration.