RICHARD WENTWORTH AT MAISON ALAÏA - <p>Galerie Azzedine Alaïa</p>

Azzedine Alaïa is delighted to present “Richard Wentworth at Maison Alaïa”, an exhibition devoted to the celebrated British artist. Over the past three years Wentworth, a friend of the house, has been a regular guest at 7 rue de Moussy, where this work evolved as part of an ongoing interest in assembling images for his archive of the world.

This exhibition offers the public selected images Richard Wentworth has gathered in the Maison, giving an unprecedented insight into the life of the most secret couture house – the world of couture being in itself invisible to the public.

During his visits, Wentworth was granted full access to the manifold aspects of the Maison Alaïa, from the creative studio to the ateliers, archives and the many other spaces that constitute the life of the great couture house.

We witness the creation of the couturier, the presentation of collections, the preparation of the fashion shows, the ateliers at work, but also the architecture of the industrial age buildings, whose structures Richard Wentworth reads; there are also the signs of the daily life of the community gathered around the couturier. Every image is like a still life, a fragment of life and couture, a portrait of the world of Azzedine Alaïa, who describes the artist’s work in these terms: “Richard’s eye is wonderful. He has made me see things I do not see, I do not pay attention to. He sees it all. I am very private, but never, with him, have I sensed a difficult presence. He makes us see things in a way we would never have seen them.”

As the artist himself says, “It’s probable that Azzedine and I get on because he knows that I can feel his sensibility for ‘assembly’ and assemblage. I think that his sensibility to dressing a form (remember that ‘dress’ is the term for shaping stone) is directly connected to my own feelings about all hidden joints and laps which allow the world to appear seamless. Ironically I have a great appetite for faults, breaks, cracks and seams and Azzedine is able to deploy the seam as an incredible device for creating a whole. One which moves in space.”

Richard Wentworth (born 1947) is a leading figure in contemporary art. His work is nurtured by an acute study of material culture and represents a system of revelations for the hidden meanings of things. Bringing together photography and sculpture, it highlights unexpected encounters between objects. Wentworth’s work has exerted considerable influence over generations of artists and has been presented at the Havana Biennial (2015), the Manchester International Festival (2013), the Venice Biennale, (2009, 2003) and the Istanbul Biennial (1995). He has also had solo exhibitions at some of the world’s most important institutions, including the Hayward Gallery (2015), the Whitechapel Gallery the (2010), and the Serpentine Gallery (1993). He is represented internationally by the Lisson Gallery and Peter Freeman Gallery.

In the early 1970s, Richard Wentworth began Making Do and Getting By, an ongoing major work, which today consists of more than two hundred thousand images of sculptural events observed around the world. A selection was published in 2016, in a book edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist.