GAM Torino
Beauty for Helmut Newton is always extreme and theatrical. Life itself is a staging of characters who live between reality and fiction. The body is the flexible tool we use to cross our most hidden carnal drives with ambiguous and ironic talent. The woman is mystery and joy, taboo and tenderness, strength and sweetness.
His sets are luxurious hotel rooms, anonymous motels, but also the garage of his apartment building in Monte Carlo. Each frame is part of a film that tells of eccentric and exclusive lives, happily dissolved in the awareness that only in the pleasure of a moment is it possible to frame a fragment of eternity, unspoilt by the passage of time.
Transgressive and provocative, Helmut Newton’s photography exudes a cheeky, childlike, playful erotic tension.
His black and white is engraved as the one created for Marlene Dietrich by the great German director Josef von Sternberg for memorable films such as The Blue Angel and Morocco. The colour is intense and ambiguous as in Querelle de Brest, the last poignant work by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Until September 27, 2020, the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino (GAM) will host “Helmut Newton. Works”, a retrospective exhibition promoted by Fondazione Torino Musei and produced by Civita Mostre e Musei with the collaboration of the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin. Through 68 iconic shots, the exhibition narrates five decades of his extraordinary artistic research.