Pace Gallery is honoured to present the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong dedicated to internationally-renowned artist Irving Penn. Featuring thirty photographs drawn from the collection of The Irving Penn Foundation, the exhibition will showcase a selection of the artist’s most iconic works in fashion photography, portraiture, nudes, and still life from four decades of his career. In addition to Penn’s photographs, the show will feature two of the artist’s mixed-media paintings, also drawn from the Foundation’s collection. Making their premiere in Asia following a debut exhibition at Pace in New York in fall 2018, these late paintings reveal the artist’s largely-unknown experimentation in the medium.

One of the most esteemed artists of the twentieth century, Penn reinvented fashion photography through his long career at Vogue. His use of a concise, smooth style and stark black and white colour palette marked an innovative shift from the ornate settings that had previously defined the genre. The exhibition features several photographs from Penn’s time at Vogue, including: The Tarot Reader (Jean Patchett & Bridget Tichenor) (1949), Velvet Helmet Hat (Sue Jenks) (1949), Black and White Fashion with Handbag (Jean Patchett) (1950), Long Sleeve (Sunny Harnett) (1951), and Balenciaga Rose Dress (1967). Other notable highlights of the show include portraits of seminal creative figures, such as Francis Bacon, Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O’Keefe, and Pablo Picasso-all of which underscore Penn’s singular talent and innate sensitivity in capturing the essence of the sitter through photography. In addition to these larger bodies of work, the exhibition will present a selection of Penn’s nudes, still lifes, ethnographic portraits, and several pieces from his Cigarette series from 1972-a series that marked a turning point in Penn’s platinum-palladium printing technique that reached new levels of detail and texture.