AMSTERDAM.- The globally renowned photographer and artist, Miles Aldridge, is celebrated for his chromatically daring, highly finished works, which recall the glamour of cinema, the charge of the femme fatale set in the trappings of modern life. One of the world’s most inspiring image-makers, Aldridge combines a meticulous approach and a rare flair for drama and narrative.

Reflex Gallery in Amsterdam presents a collection of his recent work in a show entitled ART HISTORY - a chance to see Aldridge’s response to the artists who have inspired him and shaped his visual idiom. The exhibition runs from 7 April until 22 May 2018.

Aldridge, born in London in 1964, studied at Central Saint Martins School of Art and spent days wandering around the National Gallery, sketching. It was there that he fell for the work of the Northern Renaissance artists Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer.

'Lucretia', after Lucas Cranach, is a chromogenic print showing a model posed as the classic figure of Lucretia, swathed in velvet, poised to pierce her chest with a dagger. It is a penetrating image with striking emotive impact. While referencing a historical figure, Aldridge has said that Lucretia is essentially "still the same strong woman" as those immortalised in his iconic images of housewives and Madonnas.

As part of ART HISTORY, Reflex will exhibit works from Aldridge’s extraordinary recent collaborations - with the artists Gilbert & George, Maurizio Cattelan and Harland Miller. Also included in the show are some of Aldridge’s preparatory drawings as well as Polaroids - an opportunity to see the creative inspiration and planning behind the finished product.

His Gilbert & George series, featuring the two artists in and around their East London home, represents Aldridge’s first foray into the process of photogravure. It is, he insists, a resolutely anti-digital process, and one that feels fitting for the work of Gilbert & George themselves. "It is a conscious departure back to analogue," Aldridge explains.

In his work with Maurizio Cattelan, the artist invited Aldridge to respond to his retrospective exhibition in Paris by allowing him to shoot his own responses to Cattelan’s work after the museum closed at night. The phenomenal images to emerge from Aldridge’s night at the museum must be witnessed at first hand.

Aldridge’s collaboration with Harland Miller shows the way in which his work can swing from high to low, while still exhibiting the same high production values and obsessive attention to detail. In a series of screenprints, Aldridge took Miller’s famed Penguin Classics paintings and turned them into glossy, pulpy images of women in various states of undress, reading the paperbacks.

Miles Aldridge has exhibited all over the world, from a solo show at Somerset House in London to galleries in New York, Zurich, Paris and beyond. His work is part of the permanent collection at the British Museum, London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the International Center of Photography, New York.