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Photographs: ITALIAN ICONS

Wednesday 18 June 2025, 04:00 PM • Milan

40

Giovanni Gastel

(1955 - 2021)

Ritratti di living, after Hopper, 2013

Artist's Resale Right

Estimate

€ 4.000 - 6.000

Sold

€ 5.805

The price includes buyer's premium

Information

Pigment print
cm 84 x 104 (cm 53 x 79,5 picture) | 33.1 x 40.9 in. (20.9 x 31.3 in. picture)
Edition 2 of 5
Framed

Exhibition

Giovanni Gastel. Quarant’anni di storia e immagini, Palazzo della Ragione, Milan, 2016

Literature

G. Celant (edited by), Giovanni Gastel, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo, 2016
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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