Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is proud to present
Helmut Newton – Fashion, Nudes, Portraits
From the 5th to the 19th of March, 2024.
“I think the important thing is to maintain a certain sense of ambiguity in my work. I don’t care if people understand everything behind it. I let the images speak for themselves, I let the viewer interpret them in their way.” Helmut Newton
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to present an OVR dedicated to one of Europe’s most important and influential photographers, Helmut Newton. The OVR focuses on the interweaving of the three photographic categories Fashion, Nudes, and Portraits, on which Helmut Newton bases the foundations of his creative language.
Helmut Newton’s artistic vision manifests itself through a distinctive trilogy: fashion, nudes, and portraits. However, his interpretation of these categories is anything but linear. Newton enters into the ambiguity in which a fashion photo could turn into a nude, and vice versa, while a nude could very well be a portrait. His visual language embraces this mixture of genres, often blurring conventional guidelines by assigning an image a blurred identity between the three categories. He is in love with this game of overlapping, in which the label given to an image is less important than its ability to elicit emotion and interpretation. Despite this freedom of interpretation, Newton uses a classification system to simplify access to his work, avoiding overloading it with superfluous interpretations.
Helmut Newton, born in 1920 in Berlin to a family of Jewish origin, showed an interest in photography from an early age. In 1938, Newton and his family fled Germany to escape Nazi persecution, after which Newton found work as a photographer in Singapore.
The artist changed his name to Newton in 1946 and soon became an iconic fashion photographer, known for his radical and edgy content. His work is characterized by a strong sense of voyeurism, provocative and controversial. The artist drew inspiration from film noir, expressionist cinema, sado-masochism, and surrealism. Most of Newton’s photographs were taken outside the studio, as the artist preferred to document his models in the intricate décor of palaces, elegant villas, and prestigious hotels.
