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Photographs: ITALIAN ICONS

Wednesday 18 June 2025, 04:00 PM • Milan

41

Giovanni Gastel

(1955 - 2021)

Dior, Brenda, 1988

Artist's Resale Right

Estimate

€ 1.000 - 1.500

Sold

€ 1.548

The price includes buyer's premium

Information

Inkjet print, printed in 2001
cm 48 x 34 (cm 33,3 x 26,3 picture) | 19 x 13.4 in. (13.1 x 10.4 in. picture)
Signed and dated in black ink opn the white inferior recto margin
Giovanni Gastel (Milan 1955 - 2021) was born into a family where nobility is also expressed in the love of art. Self-taught, in the early 1970s he worked for Christie's, but in 1981 his meeting with his future agent Carla Ghiglieri, who introduced him to the world of fashion, turned his career around, leading him to work for Vogue Italia and then, thanks to Flavio Lucchini and Gisella Borioli, with Mondo Uomo e Donna. In the 1980s and 1990s he signed prestigious international advertising campaigns, but he also decided to devote himself to personal research where he experimented in the artistic field with the themes of the figure, portrait, and still life already widely used in commissioned work. The major solo shows in Milan curated by Germano Celant and the one at MAXXI in Rome certified him as a well-rounded author.

If anyone had expected classic pictures in the sense of traditional it would have been useless to ask to Giovanni Gastel who, instead, preferred to convey to his photographs a dynamism and liveliness that made them unique. To evoke the refined atmospheres of Dior here he literally makes the figure of the model vibrate as she wears a very elegant dress that stands out against the light background. It's interesting to note that, while not showing the details of the girl's face, the photographer is able to give us a glimpse of her playful expression that goes well with the posture of her arms that follow the sinuosity of her body. A man endowed with a great culture that on the one hand matched irony and on the other was open to a deeper dimension (that of his poems), Giovanni Gastel had grown up in the love of art: this photograph made “in the manner of” openly evokes the atmospheres dear to the painter Edward Hopper in a compositional game where colors with pastel tones play an important role.

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