LONDON.- Hamiltons Gallery is presenting From the Roster. An expansive and evolving exhibition, From The Roster features significant works from many of the artists Hamiltons has had the privilege of exhibiting over its long history. Artists such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton and Sir Don McCullin are presented alongside rare and unique works by Horst P. Horst, Steven Meisel, Sante D’Orazio, Peter Beard, Daidō Moriyama, Andy Warhol and many more. Ever in the pursuit of quality the gallery is pleased to showcase new works by represented artists Murray Fredericks, Roger Ballen and Philippe Garner.
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A number of the selected artists have been featured in major exhibitions over the past year, including Richard Caldicott, Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon and Irving Penn in Fragile Beauty: Photographs from the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Collection at the V&A Museum. 2024 also saw a major retrospective of Irving Penn at de Young Museum, part of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, as well as Daidō Moriyama’s first UK retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery.
All of the works in From the Roster are connected by a sense of the extra-ordinary. Important works by Steven Meisel, Herb Ritts and Sante D’Orazio encapsulate an unwavering commitment to capture untouchable glamour. More confronting is the provocative gaze of photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki, one of Japan’s most renowned – and controversial - photographers. In addition to these intense studies of the human form, From The Roster contains selections from Guido Mocafico’s Serpens series of still lives which confronts the glittering darkness and danger pulsating beneath beauty. The selection also extends to stunning works of landscape photography by the great masters Albert Watson and Sir Don McCullin. United by their mastery of the craft and influence on the medium, the artists represented in the exhibition provide a thoughtfully curated overview of the modern masters of photography.
The selection of works prompts reflections on changing tastes within not only the photography market but the art world at large. By bringing these works into conversation with each other, From The Roster traces a lineage of taste-making and prompts ever-relevant conversations about capturing the evolving world we live in. Ultimately, the exhibition returns to the essential question- where do we look and how?
Highlights
Irving Penn (1917-2009) was one of the twentieth century's great photographers, known for his arresting images and masterful printmaking. Although he was celebrated as one of Vogue magazine's top photographers for more than sixty years, Penn was an intensely private man who avoided the limelight. At a time when photography was primarily understood as a means of communication, he approached it with an artist's eye and expanded the creative potential of the medium, both in his professional and personal work.
From the Roster is an opportunity to witness the evolution this crucial artist. Penn’s trajectory can be charted from his crisp rendering of flowers in the 1960s to his last published image in 2008, Small Cuttings of Bananas. This is a rare and unique chance to witness timeless gems of photography from across Penn’s career which maintain their relevance well into 2025 and beyond.
Many of the images in the exhibition still shock, provoke and disturb, a testament to the longevity and iconoclastic nature of the artists Hamiltons has worked with. Richard Avedon (1923-2004)’s electrifying 1969 portrait of Andy Warhol’s mutilated post-operation torso after he was shot by Valerie Solanas, pictured, is profoundly striking and violent with a simmering underbelly of the glamour of the dying days of the decade. The portrait of the artist as wound, not face, reverberates as sharply today as it did almost sixty years ago.
A further example of Avedon’s enduring genius of image-making is represented in Annette Gonzales, Housewife, and Her Sister Lydia Ranck, Secretary from his In the American West series. Over the course of six years, Avedon travelled through 17 states photographing a variety of everyday people, resulting in an archive of American life told through gazes which are in turn direct, engaging and challenging.
For over fifteen years, Murray Fredericks (b.1970) has used the landscape to make representations of his sublime experiences in isolation, in locations that are defined by their space and power. Drawing on minimalist techniques Fredericks’ approach has been to find locations that are devoid of features and ideally bounded by a 360 degree, perfectly flat horizon.
Fredricks has exhibited widely, his work and sits in major public and private collections nationally and internationally, including the National Gallery of Victoria, The Museum of Sydney, Artbank, the Sir Elton John Collection, Macquarie Bank, the Valentino Collection, to name a few. He has been represented by Hamiltons Gallery for over a decade.
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