From 14 February 2023 to 12 November 2023

David LaChapelle for Giacomo Ceruti. Nomad in a Beautiful Land is an original photographic exhibition, presenting a never-before-seen work executed by the famous American artist for Brescia and inspired by the production of the painter Giacomo Ceruti. The Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, the museum that preserves the largest number of Ceruti's works in the world, is hosting this shot to narrate, through a new and contemporary language, the rooms usually dedicated to the painter of the last. Together with the series Jesus is my homeboy (2003), LaChapelle's new photography insinuates itself into the dense folds of the present, to provide an attentive and conscious interpretation of marginality: an ode to social decadence.

Information and Reservations
The CUP – Single Reservation Centre answers Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The Exhibition

Curated by Denis Curti

Promoted by: Comune di Brescia, Fondazione Brescia Musei, Alleanza Cultura

In collaboration with: David LaChapelle

Il progetto è vincitore di Strategia Fotografia 2022, promosso dalla Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura

Supported by: Umberta Gnutti Beretta

Media Partner: Radio Number One

Visit with: Abbonamento Musei

Playing with a blatant ambivalence of languages, the exhibition aims at structuring an exhibition and itinerant architecture, in which the classical universe of Giacomo Ceruti meets the imagery of David LaChapelle, in a museum synergy between Fondazione Brescia Musei and the Getty Center that see Ceruti’s pauperistic works land in Los Angeles. At the same time, this enthralling challenge sees the series Jesus is my homeboy (2003) arrive at the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, accompanied by LaChapelle’s brand new work Gated Community. Classical art and photography open up to dialogue, bringing their formal differences into play in order to shake up a contemporaneity plagued by relational aridity. Gated Community, shot in Los Angels in December 2022, represents an ideological staging of the sacred and the profane, in which a very long tent city, a shelter for the homeless, crowds the city’s pavements, coloured by Hollywood opulence.

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Video Gallery

Gallery

The Artist

David LaChapelle (Fairfield, CT, 1963) is one of the most famous and esteemed living photographers, as well as a masterful interpreter of the darkest contemporary issues. In his images, one breathes a drama capable of transcending the often charged and deliberately provocative exterior in order to immerse oneself in a real dimension.

For LaChapelle, the last take on the philosophical appearance of a chimera of earthly emotionality: plastic bodies, unrealistically perfect, bearers of an apparently unquestionable happiness, expressed by eyes that are sincere and inconsolable at the same time. Throughout his entire photographic corpus, from Deluge (2006) to the recent and prophetic Revelations (2019), passing through Heaven to Hell (2006), LaChapelle has been striving for decades to awaken the public from a castrating torpor, showing how poverty is the rotten fruit of an equally sick society and therefore destined to remain inherent in all of us.