New World

With this new series, New World (2017), LaChapelle returns to an analog process and the human figure, focusing on ideas of paradise and representations of joy, nature and the soul.

MARUANI MERCIER is proud to announce David LaChapelle's new series, New World, with a world exclusive exhibition at our Brussels' gallery on October 10th, 2017. Regarded as one of the most influential photographers of the last thirty years, this profound exhibition reveals the arresting results of LaChapelle’s critical departure from celebrity portraiture and fashion editorial ten years ago.

This exceptional exhibition marks the fifth solo show by LaChapelle at MARUANI MERCIER. Organized in collaboration with BAM Mons, it highlights LaChapelle’s emergence into a renaissance where he makes artifacts out of our civilization and then transcends into parables of enlightenment and the miraculous.

With this new series, New World (2017), LaChapelle returns to an analog process and the human figure, focusing on ideas of paradise and representations of joy, nature and the soul. To uncover edifying scenes of the eternal and metaphysical, the artist paints his negatives with photographic pigment. Inspired by the symbolist painters Odilon Redon and William Blake, but also by old masters like Michelangelo, New World aims to meditate on spiritual questions.

In the series Gas (2012), LaChapelle imagines scenes where the “dazzling spectacle and retrofuture aesthetic of gas stations distract from the dangers of their function.” Set in tropical jungles, forests and deserts, LaChapelle’s stations nod to the paintings of Edward Hopper while imagining his fantasy of “a future archaeologist uncovering a gas station, as if it were an Incan temple of our day”. Aristocracy (2014) introduces three dramatic scenes of airplanes navigating through heavy atmosphere. A provocative turn into the 21st Century, LaChapelle explores “the private jet-class and the separate world they inhabit.” In Self Portrait as a House (2013), LaChapelle uses a life-size custom built American house to explore the artist’s own experience as dramatized in the building’s many rooms. On display will also be Icarus (2012), which finds the figure of Grecian youth caught in an ocean of discarded computers, Birth of Venus (2009) LaChapelle’s surreal modern interpretation of Botticelli’s symbolic nude and Nativity (2012) which represents the birth of Jesus in Africa.

MARUANI MERCIER is excited to offer this defining exhibition in which LaChapelle moves beyond mortality to reveal a new world.