Pierre et Gilles: 40 (trade edition) - Hardcover

Commoy, Pierre; Blanchard, Gilles; Troncy, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 2080202804 ISBN 13: 9782080202802

Publisher: Flammarion, 2016

Synopsis

On the fortieth anniversary of Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard’s romantic union, this volume traces four decades of artistic collaboration between the photographer and painter known as Pierre et Gilles. This year-by-year retrospective of their vast oeuvre, accompanied by an incisive essay by art critic Éric Troncy, showcases the genesis and development of their sublime, audacious, and explicitly confected fusion of photography and painting.
 
Highly sophisticated and shamelessly sexy, their art—stylized, idealized painted photographs—synthesizes tropes drawn from celebrity and mainstream gay culture with timeless themes of religion, mythology, and beauty, and many works feature international stars including Madonna, Naomi Campbell, Dita Von Teese, Kylie Minogue, Karl Lagerfeld, Mick Jagger, and Iggy Pop.

The book is available in a trade edition and in a limited art edition of 200 copies that features a signed and numbered limited edition print created especially for the book and presented in a deluxe clamshell case.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Unlike many contemporary artists whose work is based on theories of popular culture, Pierre et Gilles' artistic achievement is deliberately fused with popular culture in the present tense. Beginning with their early celebrity portraits of the late 1970s (Iggy Pop, Yves Saint-Laurent), Pierre et Gilles have created a visual world in which artifice and reality are inseparable. Employing props, make-up, costumes, and lighting that emphasize the staged quality of their photographic sets, Pierre et Gilles pursue an ideal beauty in their extravagant, hand-painted photographs that systematically demolishes any distinction between kitsch and expressions of the sublime. Both the artists and their subjects seem to insist on the complete believability of their allegorical characters, at the same time as they revel in the evidence that everything in their photographs is an illusion.

Pierre et Gilles' roots in commercial illustration for magazine and record album covers have resulted in an extraordinarily powerful combination of celebrity culture and archetypal Christian and mythological iconography. The very perfection of the beautiful boys and glamorous, weeping women who populate their artifical paradise hints at the tragedy of doomed youth and fleeting innocence that becomes increasingly explicit in their later, darker work. Eros and Thanatos are Pierre et Gilles' abiding themes, present from the start in their images of martyred saints, and coming increasingly to the fore in the sinister shadows and almost occult iconography of their latest pieces.

This exquisitely produced book provides a new and insightful assessment of this unique, idyllic marriage of photography and painting by a leading contemporary art critic, examining the emergence of a gay aesthetic and a utopian popular culture in the first substantial overview of Pierre et Gilles' career to include their latest, hitherto unpublished work.

About the Author:

Photographer Pierre Commoy and painter Gilles Blanchard met in 1976, sparking an artistic partnership that has spanned four decades. Their work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the globe, and has also appeared on numerous magazine, newspaper, and album covers. The artists received Paris’s Grand Prix de Photographie in 1993 and the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres medal in 2012.
 
Éric Troncy is an art critic and exhibition curator. He cofounded the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l’Art (1992–2000) and Frog Magazine, and is codirector of the contemporary art center Le Consortium in Dijon, France.

About this edition

• Publisher: Flammarion
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 2080202804
• ISBN 13: 9782080202802
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400