HELMUT NEWTON - A gun for hire, selection. Le shots for Blumarine 1993-1999

Exhibited for the first time in #carpi, Italy, a corpus of over 50 photographs, selected from the famous exhibition “A gun for hire” which collects the images shot by #helmutnewton for the promotional campaigns of Blumarine, excellence brand of the Emilian city textile district.



From 10 September to 11 December 2016 the town of #carpi (Modena) honours one of the greatest #fashion photographers of all time, with an exhibition showing shots never exhibited before in Italy.
The over 50 images of the exhibition #helmutnewton. A gun for hire, selection / The shots for Blumarine 1993-1999 , an #event that recreates, in the Museums of Palazzo dei Pio setting, the period which saw the German master working for one of the symbols of the textile industry of #carpi, next to turn its fortieth anniversary (in 2017), by conceiving communication campaigns involving femininity icons such as Carré Otis, Nadja Auermann, Carla Bruni, Monica Bellucci ed Eva Herzigova.

The exhibition, curated by Luca Panaro, is designed and produced by the Municipality of Carpi- Museums of the Palazzo dei Pio in collaboration with the #helmutnewton Foundation of Berlin, from which almost all the shown unreleased materials arrive, and with Blumarine, thanks to the financial contribution of the Foundation Cassa di Risparmio #carpi, Banca Popolare dell’Emilia, CMB and Unipol Insurance.

With the title A gun for hire it is considered the major retrospective travelling exhibition, showed the first time in Montecarlo in 2005, which shows in a timely manner the Helmut Newton’s work for the most famous brands campaigns of that period and services for the most important #fashion magazines starting from the 1960s up to the date of his death in 2004. The #carpi exhibition specifically focuses on a well defined period of the long and passionate creative photographer’s story : the one that saw him carry through the campaigns for seven different Blumarine collections, starting from Spring-Summer 1993 up to Automn-Winter 198/1999.

An epochal project for those years. It’s the first time, in fact, that an Italian brand, tied to the traditional idea of family business ideally oriented to the elegance of a bourgeois woman , chooses to show up so much innovation, revolutionising its communication system in favour of more eccentric and playfully sensual femininity. The campaigns developed by Newton go, this way, outside the usual box, refusing the study of poses and the construction of the storyboard, experiencing the instinctiveness and the immediacy of inspiration.
The models - among the most known and loved of those years: from Carré Otis to Carla Bruni, from Monica Bellucci to Eva Herzigova – perform an amused sensuality, never vulgar, gracefully allusive, expressed through an unconscious which transforms the explosive and colourful energetic charge of the Pop to divertissement nonsense.

Among the characters of this great communication experiment there is the physical entrance of the author himself in the image that Newton had already experienced in some of his works: to accentuate the nonconformist character of the campaigns, expressing the widest freedom from the concept cages, here’s Newton enter the field – as a fleeting shadow or showing just a foot- and remain imprinted on the film, giving sometimes the viewer the illusion, to be behind the camera.

The exhibition, set up in the loggias of the Palazzo dei Pio piano nobile, consists of 34 large format photographs documenting the artist’s campaigns for Blumarine and other 12 shots, belonging as well to A Gun for Hire project and unreleased in Italy, dedicated instead to the works carried out by Newton, in the same period, for griffes such as Versace, Yves Saint Laurent and Thierry Mugler: a confrontation, this way , contextualizing the projects created for the #carpi brand within the artist’s professional experience and the communication dogmas of high #fashion at that precise historical moment.

To complete the exhibition, other seven shots of the Blumarine campaigns, never showed before, from the private collection of Anna Molinari, who founded the company together with her husband Gianpaolo Tarabini; moreover, the books realised with the Newton’s photographic campaigns and two unpublished albums with photographs and notes of the author.
Finally, in the Sala dei Mori, the projection of videos to give evidence, through interviews and documentaries, of Helmut Newton’s figure and artistic creed.

THE #fashion IN #carpi – The city of #carpi is leade of a textile district, able today, in the province of #modena, to involve approximately 2.600 companies with a yearly turnover estimated at around 3 billions euros, of which about the 30% from export.



10 September – 11 December 2016
HELMUT NEWTON. A gun for hire, selection
Le shots for Blumarine 1993-1999
Curated by Luca Panaro
In collaboration with the #helmutnewton Foundationof Berlin and Blumarine
Carpi (MO) – Museums of the Palazzo dei Pio 
Piazza dei Martiri, 68
Info: tel 059/649955 - 360
Orari: From Tuesday to Sunday, h.10-13; Thursday, Saturday , Sunday and public holidays also 15-19. Closed on Monday.
Ticket 5 euros, reduced 3 euro