The most important retrospective of the famous American photographer ever shown in Spain is on view until May 1, 2025.
Located on this tip of Galicia, A Coruña, a port city well known to sailors for being an important meteorological landmark, the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation, open since 2022, does not do things by halves. After Peter Lindberg, Steven Meisel and Helmut Newton in 2023, the fourth edition presents Irving Penn, in collaboration with The Irving Penn Foundation. Annual exhibitions perhaps, but what exhibitions… Of international scope, they are based on three axes, photography, fashion and A Coruña, all accompanied by educational programs and luxurious publications ; this time a reissue of Irving Penn: Centennial, in Spanish, and containing no less than 300 images, originally published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The MET, whose exhibition curator Jeff Rosenheim traveled for the occasion, to present the exhibition.
Created in 2017, this tribute exhibition was supposed to celebrate the centenary of the photographer’s birth, through more than 170 photographs and other unique pieces, such as the unfolding photo background that he used, reinstalled here within the exhibition.
All the themes that mark Penn’s career are present, from his beginnings in the late 1930s to the first decade of the 21st century. The elegance and beauty in his fashion photography; the stripped-down and abstract nudes; the minimalism of the still lifes, which fascinated him; his portraits, which seem to capture the psychology of cultural figures; the series of ordinary workers, immortalized in the four corners of the world, in their outfits and with their tools. A meticulous technician and follower of simplicity, Penn had the singular quality of distilling the notion of timelessness in his images, while preserving their narrative content. It is also on the complexity and ephemerality of the human condition that the exhibition focuses here. Throughout his seventy-year career, Penn not only developed a keen sense for observing human behavior, but he was a pioneer in bringing and carrying the practice of photography to a recognized artistic level. His work in fashion for Vogue, which set new standards and redefined the genre, can also be seen as a mirror of the society that was emerging in the 20th century. The words of the president of the foundation, Maria Ortega Pérez, best sum up the event: “Irving Penn’s photographic work is exemplary. In his hands, the everyday becomes extraordinary, revealing the profound beauty of simplicity. His work does more than capture moments, it captures the essence of his subjects and invites us to see the world with new eyes.”
Jean-Jacques Ader
“Irving Penn: Centennial”, exhibition from November 23, 2024 to May 1, 2025 at the MOP Foundation, La Coruña – Spain
https://irvingpenn-coruna.com/es
