Dennis Hopper: Californian Creativity
An exhibition of photographs by Dennis Hopper captures the 1960s and 1970s Californian creative scene, including snapshots of a selection of legendary visual artists.
During his rise to Hollywood stardom, Hopper captured the establishment-busting spirit of the 1960s in photographs that travel from Los Angeles to Harlem, in the US to Tijuana, Mexico. The images portray iconic figures including Tina Turner, Andy Warhol, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Rediscovered after Hopper’s death, the historically significant ‘Lost Album’ comprises over 400 black and white photographs taken between 1961—when Hopper’s soon-to-be wife Brooke Hayward gave him a Nikon camera for his birthday—and 1967.
This exhibition focuses on two bodies of work that offer glimpses of the luminaries and landscapes of Hopper’s private life during the 1960s and 1970s: a selection of portraits from ‘The Lost Album’, depicting now legendary artists such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha; and Drugstore Camera, a series shot in Taos, New Mexico.
Taken with quick-use cameras and developed in drugstore photo labs, the Drugstore Camera photographs document Hopper’s friends and family among the ruins and open vistas of the desert landscape; female nudes in shadowy interiors; road trips to and from Hopper’s home state of Kansas; and spontaneous still life assemblages of discarded objects.
Hopper’s work is on display in collaboration with Gagosian at Eden Rock Gallery, St Baths, France until Friday 31 January 2014.
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