ROME.- Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome presents from April 30th until September 13th the exhibition “David LaChapelle, After the Deluge” curated by Gianni Mercurio. The exhibition promoted by Roma Capitale – Assessorato alla Cultura a Turismo and produced in collaboration with Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, Madeinart and David LaChapelle Studio is one of the most important and biggest retrospective dedicated to the great American artist and photographer.

There are more than 100 works on view, some presented for first time in a museum including many large-scale works.

The exhibition focuses on the works realized by the artist starting from 2006, when he produces the monumental series titled “The Deluge”, which leads to a meaningful turning point in the artistic path of David LaChapelle.

Through the realization of “The Deluge”, modeled after Michelangelo’s impressive fresco in the Sistine Chapel, the artist returns to conceiving works with the unique purpose to exhibit in art galleries and in museums. After “The Deluge”, the American photographer begins to produce artwork with new aesthetical and conceptual concerns.

As written in the curator’s essay: “the most evident sign of the change is the vanishing of the human presence in the serial works: the living models, that in all the previous works (the only exception is “The Electric Chair”, 2001, personal interpretation of Andy Warhol’s famous artwork) have had a central part in the composition and in the message embodied by the image, disappear. The “Car Crash”, “Negative Currencies”, “The Earth Laughs in Flowers”, “Gas Stations”, “Land Scapes”, up to the most recent “Aristocracy” series, follow this new aesthetic choice: LaChapelle resoundingly deletes the flesh, what was the previously identifiable element of his art”.

To allow the public to know the "origins" of LaChapelle work before “The Deluge”, the exhibition also includes a selection of some of the most renowned and loved photos that made him famous, realized during the decade between 1995 and 2005. A body of work that gathers all the portraits of celebrities, from music to fashion and movies, scenes based on religious themes with surrealistic touches, references to masterpieces of art history and cinema, an artistic production defined by the chromatic saturation and movement, with which the American photographer reached his particular aesthetical style and influenced many artists of the following generations.

In the exhibition there is also a projection space dedicated to the backstage videos, which, describing the composite process of photo sets construction, clearly reveal as that the artist’s role is extended also to direction and scenic design of his own photos.

Also presented are some of the most meaningful documentary and music video, starting from “Rize”, shot in the streets of South Central, Los Angeles and awarded at the Sundance Film Festival, up to “Take Me to Church”, with the amazing ballet dancer Sergei Polunin, one of the most viewed videos on the web.

David LaChapelle is today one of the most famous and appreciated photographers in the world. Born in Fairfield, CT in 1963, he embraced a post-pop style, in some way surrealist, which makes him unique in the world.

His artworks are exhibited in the most important public and private international collections and in many museums, among those: Musée D’Orsay, Paris; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles; The National Portrait Gallery, London; Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm e The National Portrait Gallery a Washington DC. David LaChapelle lives and works in Los Angeles and Hawaii.