The Marlborough Gallery presents the photographic work of Irving Penn

The Marlborough Gallery presents, on September 15 and until November 12, the photographic work of Irving Penn in an exhibition included as part of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend. Known for his striking images and mastery of the photographic technique, which in his time was considered a tool for documentation, Penn approached this medium with an artist's eye and thus expanded its potential creative He stood out for a precise and elegant photographic style, with great interest in detail and an admirable mastery of light and chiaroscuro.

He elevated fashion photography, a purely commercial fact until then, to the category of art by using new resources such as the naturalness of the models, minimalism and neutral backgrounds or lighting, and obtaining as a result a mixture between distinction and simplicity. Simplicity was his trademark.

Among all his interests, and linked to his aesthetic spirit, he carried out a large collection of photographs of indigenous tribes; in the sixties he traveled through Africa and Latin America with a camera and a neutral background making portraits of different cultures and tribes. He composed the images in a very pictorial way, and did not leave anything to chance, he controlled every detail.

Irving Penn during his long career, which spanned nearly seven decades, pioneered the use and recovery of 19th century technical methods, experimentation that he carried out when he closed his Manhattan studio and immersed himself in platinum printing in the laboratory he built on the family farm in Long Island, New York. This gave rise to three major series: Cigarettes (1972), presented at MOMA in New York in 1975, Street Material (1975-76), exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977, and Archeology (1979-80), exhibited in the Marlborough gallery also in New York in 1982, consolidating its relationship with the gallery, which preserves a collection of historical photographs, part of which will be shown in the exhibition.