DAVID LACHAPELLE (B.1963), Addicted to Diamonds, 1997

DAVID LACHAPELLE (B.1963)
Addicted to Diamonds, 1997
c-print, face-mounted to acrylic, flush-mounted on aluminium
signed in ink on typed titled, dated and numbered 'AP 2/5' photographer's studio label (flush mount, verso)
image/sheet/face and flush mount: 23 ½ x 17 in. (59.5 x 43 cm.)
This work is number two artist's proof from an edition of twenty-seven, plus five artist's proofs.

Pre-Lot Text
A bold recorder of our times, David LaChapelle uses subversive humour, kaleidoscopic colours and highly sexualised hyper-real aesthetics. His photographs, whether celebrity portraits, allegorical religious images or thin-veiled critiques of consumerism, leave nothing to the imagination and exert a strange, seductive power. LaChapelle was propelled into the field of photography following a chance encounter with Andy Warhol, who hired him as a photographer on his magazine Interview, reportedly telling him: ‘Do whatever you want. Just make sure everybody looks good’ (A. Warhol, quoted in G. Nicholson, ‘Stargazing’, Modern Painters, May 2006, pp. 78-83). Taking this edict to heart, LaChapelle has forged a singular style that is both bizarre and hauntingly beautiful.
Like Warhol before him, LaChapelle makes no distinction between high and low culture. Fascinated with the cult of celebrity, he is perhaps most famed for submerging his celebrity sitters within the Western European tradition of painting, appropriating icons of the Italian Renaissance such as Michelangelo’s Pieta in his memorable depiction of Courtney Love clutching a body resembling her husband Kurt Cobain, and Botticelli’s Venus and Mars in his rendering of Naomi Campbell as the Roman goddess Venus in The Rape of Africa. The staged artificiality and internal glow of his work, in turn, makes manifest his fascination with the theatrical compositions and stark chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s Baroque paintings. This ability to imbue his work with historical and intellectual weight has seen LaChapelle transcend the label of ‘celebrity snapper’ and become the leading figure in Western contemporary image-making.