Galerie Gmurzynska is thrilled to present Stylistics, after two museum shows Ezra Petronio’s first gallery exhibition. A creative genius with a perfectionist’s attention to detail for over 30 years.
Featuring portraits spread across Galerie Gmurzynska’s spaces at Paradeplatz and Talstrasse in Zurich, the exhibition will survey the career of a legendary figure in the fashion and art worlds, working as a photographer, an art director, a designer, and as a publisher of Self Service magazine.
'I am old school, pre-digital, and I learned how to make everything from scratch. My father and grandfather were in this business, and the mentors I worked with taught me about attention to detail.' –Ezra Petronio
The show focuses on Petronio’s unique use of the Polaroid—a medium pioneered by Andy Warhol and Lucas Samaras—by using only a Land camera and FP-100 Polaroid Films by Fuji, creating unique portraits of some of the most influential personalities of the last three decades, chronicling and archiving the seminal shifts in arts and culture.
This two-part exhibition provides two countervailing, visceral experiences of Petronio’s portraiture. One room displays 120 unique, intimate Polaroids of a dazzling constellation of cultural icons, collectively presenting an almost overwhelming sense of being in uniquely close proximity to this radical pantheon of thinkers and creators. The second gallery consists of works that push beyond the conventional Polaroid frame with expanded sizes that emphasize the material objecthood of analogue textures and the deep pictorial qualities of Petronio’s chosen photographic techniques. Through diptych, triptych, collage configurations, he manifests these hyper-extensions of the qualities and of his portraits and creates transformative renderings of his subjects.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with texts and an interview by Charlotte Cotton.
ABOUT EZRA PETRONIO
Born in New York in 1968, Ezra Petronio is among the most influential image-makers of his generation, whose work with leading fashion and beauty brands has resonated for more than 25 years. Based in Paris, Petronio is the founder and creative director of Petronio Associates, a multidisciplinary creative and strategic agency established in 1993. Over the past few decades, Petronio has worked alongside with the greatest minds of the fashion and creative industry—Karl Lagerfeld, Jil Sander, and Miuccia Prada to name a few—serving as an art and creative director for powerhouses such as YSL, Miu Miu and Chanel. Petronio began using Polaroid as a preferred medium for portraiture when he founded Self Service magazine in 1994, using a Land camera to document the characters and personalities featured in the magazine.
GALERIE GMURZYNSKA is an international art gallery with locations in Zurich, Zug and St. Moritz, Switzerland, that specialises in modern and contemporary art as well as Russian avant-garde.
The gallery was founded in 1965 in Cologne, Germany by Antonina Gmurzynska. From the beginning, the gallery was interested in organising exhibitions that had a documentary character both through the choice of themes and through its publications.
In 1996 Mathias Rastorfer became a partner of both extensions of the gallery, having been with it since 1991 when he left his position as Associate Director at Pace Gallery in New York. Under his influence and in addition to the gallery’s traditional repertoire, the work of contemporary artists such as Donald Judd, Louise Nevelson and Yves Klein amongst others, was incorporated. Ten years later the gallery opened its third branch in St. Moritz at Via Serlas, in 2003.
Forty years after its establishment, Krystyna Gmurzynska and Mathias Rastorfer relocated the gallery from Cologne to its new flagship location in Zurich’s Paradeplatz in 2005. The building that currently houses the gallery dates back to 1857 and it is the same building in which the Dada movement was founded in 1917. The first exhibition in Zurich was a solo exhibition by Alexander Calder entitled, The Modernist, that was thoroughly endorsed by the Calder Foundation, which described it is as, 'rare to experience a presentation of this quality outside of a museum'. As with each exhibition at the gallery the show featured a fully illustrated catalogue with important essays.
Galerie Gmurzynska continues to present unique exhibitions that are both historically well researched and scientifically documented. It also continues to work with leading art historians as well as collaborating with museums on exhibitions and for the enlargement of their permanent collections. Additionally, it currently participates in several art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze Masters in London, Salon in New York and Art Basel, Switzerland. In the past it has taken part in FIAC, Abu Dhabi and PAD New York.
