Fundació Antoni Vila Casas Castell de Vila-seca hosts a retrospective of Frank Horvat

With the exhibition Please don't smile , the Fundació Antoni Vila Casas presents at Castell de Vila-seca a retrospective of one of the most iconic photographers of the second half of the 20th century, the Italo-French Frank Horvat (Abbazia (Italy), the current Opatija (Croatia), 1928 - Boulogne-Billancourt, France, 2020). The exhibition can be visited from November 8, 2023 to May 19, 2024.

Horvat is a renowned photographer who dedicated himself – in the decade of the fifties and sixties of the last century – to the genre of fashion photography. With a look ahead of his time in this branch of photography, Frank Horvat helped popularize the name through collaborations for an extensive list of magazines. For magazine editors, it was the journalistic equivalent of the leap from haute couture to ready-to-wear. She worked for Elle in Paris, Vogue in London and Glamor and Harper's Bazaar in New York. He was one of the first photographers to change the set to the street, which gave his photographs an aura of modernity. With an interesting humanistic background and great knowledge of technique, his work is as heterodox as it is unclassifiable; a work that he developed through the exploration of different registers, such as portraiture, documentary photography or nature.

The exhibition, designed and directed by Antoni Vila Casas and Frank Horvat himself in 2018, presents a careful selection of photographs that present us with an inexhaustible, unpredictable and recurring Horvat. His work shows us his side as a fashion photographer who changed the rules in order to provide a different, more human and more poetic look. Frank Horvat's production is heterodox and unclassifiable, where women and fashion play a central role. Much of Horvat's artistic and professional life was spent among models, in search of the perfect gesture, of the moment that captivated the covers of the most prestigious fashion magazines.

Horvat's work, framed in a timely debauchery, is dominated by a sweet shyness that fails to succumb to the healthy conviction of those who know they are doing well. Original and atypical, he proposes an easy, natural, poetic photograph, with a simple essence – not simple – and which, surrounded by an aura of calm and order, manages to freeze the moment with an ease that has nothing banal. However, it shows that sincerity is very difficult.