Gilles Bensimon’s “Watercolour” Exhibit Opens in London
Gilles Bensimon, famed fashion photographer and former International Creative Director of Elle magazine, has entered the fine art world with his exhibition, “Watercolour,” now open to the public in London’s Hamiltons gallery.
To create the pieces in the exhibition, Bensimon submerged great varieties of fresh-cut flowers in a swimming pool and photographed them from above, catching an ever-changing variety of colors and effects as the light reflected off the moving water. Experimenting with the concept of transience that flowers evoke, while blurring the line between the abstract and figurative, Bensimon has worked on these photographs for over two years.
In the resulting images, the title of the exhibition comes to life as the flowers are transformed into intense, rippling swaths of color filling the frame. The photographs are disorienting and a little surreal, but translate the original beauty of the flowers in a new way.
Speaking to WWD.com, Bensimon says, “I wanted to call the exhibition ‘Marie Antoinette’ because you chop off the head of something so beautiful. I realized the flower is something very tragic. When you cut them, they’re dead. But when you put them in water, they start to come alive again. They have a rebirth.” It is this type of fleeting magic that he sought to capture with the photographs.
As the Hamiltons Gallery describes, this exhibition “marks a significant departure from his well-known earlier figurative oeuvre.” While overseeing the pages of Elle, Bensimon photographed some of the biggest names in fashion, music and culture. His subjects include Madonna, Beyoncé, Gisele Bundchen and Sarah Jessica Parker. This is his first venture into fine art.
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