Hardly a year after the opening of its amazing venue in Brussels, Galerie de la Béraudière is pleased to announce a first exhibition on photography devoted to a living figure of this medium, the New Yorker William Klein.
Considered one of the most important photographers of his generation, William Klein imposed a style which went against the trend of the day: revolutionary through his choice of subjects, his unusual compositions, his deliberate use of blurriness, the artist made the photographic genre evolve considerably. He describes his work as ‘a crash course in what was not to be done in photography’.
In the early 1950s, he started documenting his native city, taking pictures of New York’s stimulating street life.
From 1955 to 1965, Klein revisited fashion photography and influenced it decisively by photographing models outside the sanitized studios, freed from gaze of the artistic directors of fashion houses and by confronting them with landscapes and city life. Icons such as Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Serge Gainsbourg and Anouk Aimée were immortalized by the artist. Several generations of supermodels have also stepped in front of his lens, from the anonymous beauties of the 1950s to Veruschka and many others... Images engraved in the collective memory.
His audacity profoundly shook up the world of photography and consecrated him as one of the pioneers of ‘street photography’ and a revolutionary in the world of fashion. He inspired generations of photographers.
Klein’s work has been exhibited around the world, at MoMA in New York and at the Pompidou Centre in Paris as well as at Tate Modern in London.
Klein has had a very special relation with Belgium, and in particular with Knokke, where he owned a house: his wife, Jeanne Florin, with whom he lived and worked for more than 50 years, was Belgian. Several exhibitions have been devoted to him in Belgium, including in 2016 at the Botanique in Brussels.
For his exhibition, Galerie de la Béraudière, which has specialized in masters from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for many years, is joining forces with the Antwerp Gallery FIFTY ONE, which represents Klein’s work and is renowned for its expertise in the field of photography.
Galerie de la Béraudière in Brussels and Gallery FIFTY ONE in Antwerp invite you to (re)discover in a more intimate context the diversity of William Klein’s world by bringing together mainly his fashion pictures from the 1960s but also some iconic street shots. They will confront the unusual and surprising space of Galerie de la Béraudière, which was once an artist’s studio.
