David Bailey: Stardust
The Milan Contemporary Art Pavilion (PAC) features a solo exhibition by David Bailey (b.1938, London), one of the world’s most influential photographers and a fundamental force in the visual arts. Stardust offers a novel look at an iconic artist, celebrating one of the greatest living photographers through more than 300 of his works. In a career spanning more than five decades, Bailey has shown boundless creativity in portraying individuals and groups, many of them celebrities, some unknown, all captivating and memorable.
Produced and promoted by the City of Milan Cultural Department and Tod’s, the exhibition marks the beginning of a multiyear collaboration between the prestigious international firm and the Contemporary Art Pavilion to stage major exhibitions of the protagonists of today’s arts scene. ‘A leap forward in the collaboration between the City of Milan and Tod’s, which has been a supporter of the PAC for over ten years, recently renewing its partnership for another four years with the Milanese contemporary art exhibition venue,” stated Councillor for Culture Filippo Del Corno. ‘The exhibition in question is dedicated to the great artist and photographer David Bailey. It reaffirms the PAC’s vocation for staging major international shows and transforms its relationship with Tod’s into a genuine communion of intent that will take the form of shared projects to communicate and disseminate the full range of contemporary expressive language.’
Widely acclaimed as one of the founding fathers of contemporary photography, David Bailey has shot some of the most iconic portraits of the past five decades. His early works captured and defined the atmosphere of 1960s London and made stars of a new generation of models, including Jean Shrimpton and Penelope Tree. Discarding the rigid rules of a previous generation of portrait and fashion photographers, Bailey infused his works with the fresh energy of London street culture, creating the casual, cool style that has become his hallmark.
Curated by Bailey himself and produced in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery of London and the magazine ICON, the exhibition features an extensive series of photographs selected personally by Bailey to represent the most distinctive and memorable images of a career spanning more than half a century. Innovative and provocative, Bailey’s work includes intense and evocative shots of actors, writers, musicians, directors, models, designers and other icons of fashion, artists, and a medley of people encountered during his travels.
There is a palpable engagement between artist and subject in all his shots, from those of the celebrities Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Jack Nicholson and Kate Moss to the photos of unknown nudes who volunteered to pose for Bailey’s project ‘Democracy’ between 2001 and 2005; from such icons of the music scene as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones to the great protagonists of visual arts such as Salvator Dalì portrayed together with Andy Warhol, and also Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst
