Revisiting William Klein: Fashion: A Decade On — Inaugural Exhibition, New Showroom

Grob Gallery is proud to present Revisiting William Klein: Fashion, the inaugural exhibition of its new showroom in Parracombe, Devon. Returning to a body of work first shown by the gallery a decade ago, this exhibition invites renewed attention to Klein's extraordinary contribution to twentieth-century fashion photography — work that, with the passage of time, reads not merely as period documentation but as a sustained act of artistic radicalism. William Klein (born New York, 1928) came to photography through an unlikely route. After graduating from high school at fourteen and studying sociology at the City College of New York, he served in the United States Army before moving to Paris on the G.I. Bill. There he attended the Sorbonne and studied painting briefly under Fernand Léger. Paris became his permanent home from 1948 onwards, the base from which he pursued work across painting, graphic design, photography, and film. When Klein returned to New York in 1954, he threw himself into the city's chaos with a photographer's hunger and a painter's eye. His urban work was conceived in deliberate opposition to the prevailing ethos of elegance and restraint exemplified by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Between 1955 and 1965, this same restless energy was brought to bear on his commissions for Vogue. The results were unlike anything fashion photography had produced before. Alexander Liberman, Klein's editor at Vogue, wrote that in the fashion pictures of the fifties nothing like Klein had happened before — that he went to extremes requiring great ego and courage, pioneering the telephoto and wide-angle lens, introducing new perspectives, and taking fashion out of the studio and into the streets. Ten years on from our first presentation of this work, those words feel no less true. If anything, the pictures seem more vivid and more strange. The selection for this revisiting brings together three landmark works from Klein's Vogue years. Simone + Nina, Piazza di Spagna Nr. 2, Rome (Vogue) captures the photographer's ability to dissolve the boundary between staged glamour and Grob Gallery SA, Route Des Jeunes 4 Bis, 1227 Acacias, Genève . // +44 7485767913 // info@grobgallery.com www.grobgallery.com // TVA:CHE-304.553.535-TVA urban life — two figures absorbed into the grain of a Roman afternoon. Anne St. Marie + Isabella + Mirror, Queensborough Bridge, New York, 1959 is among the most formally audacious images of the period, its reflective doubling turning the bridge's industrial geometry into something almost painterly. And Antonia + Simone, Barbershop, New York (Vogue) finds Klein in his most characteristic register: vernacular, immediate, the world of commerce and beauty rituals observed with an anthropologist's attention and a wit that never tips into condescension. Marking the opening of Grob Gallery's new Parracombe showroom with a return to Klein feels appropriate. His is work that rewards revisiting — work that resists the reduction to historical curio, insisting instead on its own continued strangeness and force.