Christie’s Private Sales presents Other Graces: Photographs by Sante D’Orazio, a selling exhibition that spans the photographer’s exhilarating career from the 1990s to the present. Sante D’Orazio’s oeuvre is an alluring combination of sex and celebrity: a world populated by beautiful Supermodels, megawatt actresses like Diane Krueger or Kate Moss casually lounging on a sofa, shirtless rock stars like Axl Rose, Keith Richards and high-profile sirens like Pamela Anderson. Through his lens, modern celebrities became mythological beings, reflecting the values of our idol obsessed times: Eternal Youth. Naked Beauty. Rock ‘n’ Roll.
Other Graces focuses on large-scale editions of photographs taken by D’Orazio over the past three decades, newly printed by the artist in editions of 3. The exhibition will include the provocative fashion photographs that he became known for, his Priest series, to be shown for the first time in the United States, and his new works, which have been created from 1970s erotic film footage that has been spliced together and hand-painted to create a new abstract image.
An Interview with Sante D’Orazio
Artist, collector and tastemaker Sante D’Orazio sits down with Christie’s Photographs specialist Laura Paterson to discuss his upcoming exhibition Other Graces and his own redemption through art.
Can you tell us about the images created at the pinnacle of your career as a commercial photographer?
My only sense of salvation in those days was to pull the girl aside during a lunch break and do my picture. The pictures –the good ones that I felt satisfied coming home with, were the outtakes. They were the pictures that were rejected because they did not suit the literal narrative. They were the ones I did in the back room, the ones I did in the bedroom.
I was doing the risqué stuff, because [again] beauty was my thing, which meant nudity, semi- nudity, and at the time, that was as risqué as some of the stuff you see today. My pictures look tame now of course, twenty- five years later, but if you think about it in that time period [they were] the most sensual and sexy of the pictures and they appealed to women most of all. That was the key.
Would you mind talking a bit about your art collection and its influence on your own work?
I grew up in a family of artists in Italy. My cousin who inspired me most was a painter and my other cousin was a first violinist. My mother and uncle were opera singers. When I went to Italy I was inspired by the arts, when I came back [to the US] doors were open to me. I find the sacred in art, the pieces that I own are sacred objects to me. There is a language there that speaks to the unknown. My respect for art is great and it is sacred to me, to own a piece is being a witness. Most of the pieces I’ve collected are from people I knew.
An art collector can be an artist. I collect what I see in myself. It’s not conceptual, it’s sensory. Each piece in my collection has a certain harmony because ultimately it’s a self-portrait. Every picture you take is a self-portrait; everything you collect is a self-portrait, the way you sign your name. Everything in this collection is a self-portrait and that’s how I collect.
How did you curate a collection of your works for this Christie’s exhibition?
A : The selection for the Christie’s show, it was difficult. You start with a hundred images and you start breaking it down. Just editing like you would for a film. You pull highlights but they don’t work together, so you switch them up. Then you pick things that are autobiographical. I have all these pictures of priest but they are artists; they are making these objects of worship. The high priests of Modern Art, they all took part in it: Damien Hirst, Maurizio Cattelan, Ed Ruscha, Jeff Koons. On one side of my life was my mother. I grew up in a Roman Catholic home she prayed three times a day- she should have been a nun! My father, on the other hand, could not give a hoot about the church. In the basement were all the pinups and the magazines. He was a jokester and a prankster,he told a lot of dirty jokes, and my mother would make the sign of the cross. And that is in my show, it is the contrast between the good boy and the bad boy within myself, within all of us, so you have the pinups and you have the priest.
Christie’s Private Sales Presents The Selling Exhibition Of Other Graces: Photographs By Sante D’orazio
From March 29th to April 19th, 2013
Christie’s Private Sales Galleries
at Rockefeller Center
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020
Tel: +1 (212) 636 2680
