As part of its expanding fine art program, The Beverly Hills Hotel features an exhibition of new works this October by Los Angeles-based photographer Jin-Woo Prensena, curated by the hotel’s Curator of the Arts, Jim Hedges. Born in Germany and of South Korean descent, Prensena is best known for his boundary-pushing aerial landscapes. Titled Reflections, the exhibition includes a number of aerial photographs in the artist’s signature style, which he achieves by such means as open-air flying or dangling 7,500 feet out of a helicopter. The 24 landscape and aerial images presented in the exhibition were shot between 2016-2021, and span the globe, from Malibu to Capri, Whistler to London, and all the way to the desert of Namibia and the Highlands of Iceland. Printed at an immersive scale, the resulting images evoke a signature peaceful simplicity that belies the photographer’s daring methods.
The aerial shots implicitly reference the artist’s presence yet remain abstracted in their hypnotic vastness. As Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography Tucson, Arizona observed in her essay accompanying the collection exhibition From Above, presented at the Phoenix Museum of Art, “This aerial photographic language, or aerial vision, can present a puzzle to a viewer. Thus, photographs made from the air create tension between the abstracted view and a viewer’s desire to “crack the code” and understand what they are looking at.” Through his extrospective works, Prensena affirms that even in a complex world, profound beauty exists everywhere.
Jin-Woo Prensena : Reflections
October 10, 2023–February 15, 2024
The Beverly Hills Hotel
9641 Sunset Blvd.
Beverly Hills, CA 90210
Admission is free and open to the public seven days a week.
All works are available for purchase through Hedges Projects.
www.dorchestercollection.com/los-angeles/the-beverly-hills-hotel
