ARTES

Painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and all-round showman Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was one of the 20th century’s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics. One of the first artists to apply the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to art, he is celebrated in particular for his surrealist practice, with such conceits as the soft watches or the lobster telephone, now hallmarks of the surrealist enterprise, and of modernism in general. Dalí frequently described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs.” Their tantalizing tension and interest resides in the precise rendering of bizarre elements and incongruous arrangements. As Dalí himself explained, he painted with “the most imperialist fury of precision,” but only “to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.” Revolutionizing the role of the artist, the mustache-twirling Dalí also had the intuition to parade a controversial persona in the public arena and, through printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and film, to create work that could be consumed and not just contemplated on a gallery wall.

In the 1980, fashion wanted to make a statement and found in legendary British fashion photographer David Bailey its perfect chronicler. After Bailey shaped the style of the Swinging Sixties, fashion in the eighties posed a new challenge: brighter colours, higher glamour, statuesque models, extreme makeup, spandex, lycra, jumpsuits, power dressing, big hair, and as Grace Coddington puts it in her introduction, “jackets with padded shoulders over the shortest mini-skirts and dangerously high-heeled shoes.”

Artista pop, pintor de la vida moderna, paisajista, maestro del color, explorador de la imagen y de la percepción durante seis decadas, David Hockney es conocido por ser un artista que siempre encuentra nuevas formas para explorar el mundo y sus posibilidades de representación. No ha dejado de crear imágenes inolvidables: obras con líneas gráficas y texto integrado durante los Swinging Sixties en Londres; la famosa serie de piscinas, crónica del estilo de vida californiano en la decada de 1970; así como penetrantes retratos y paisajes de gran formato y colores brillantes tras su regreso a su Yorkshire natal. Además de los dibujos en los que traslada lo que ve directamente al papel, hay collages multiperspectiva hechos con polaroids que abren el espacio a un sinfín de vistas de gran detalle, y dibujos realizados con iPad en los que captura la luz con un medio más moderno, testimonio todo ello del placer que Hockney siempre ha encontrado en la experimentación.

Good News follows David LaChapelle’s creative renaissance as he surrenders to contemplations of mortality, moving beyond the material world in a quest for paradise. Featuring a monumental curation of images, it is a sublime and arresting new body of work that attempts to photograph that which can’t be photographed. It represents the final chapter to LaChapelle’s narrative in a collection of books that have captivated a generation of viewers across the globe.

Lost + Found is a visual recording of the times we live in and the issues we face, expressed through David LaChapelle’s unique and distinctive vision. Featuring a monumental curation of images that have never before been published in book form, it chronicles LaChapelle’s strongest images as a visionary to date while encapsulating our time in history.