Running from November 3 to 27, this show will trace Penn’s indelible mark on the history of photography, highlighting his 70-year tenure as a fashion photographer for Vogue. Featuring photographs in black-and-white and colour, the presentation will shed light on the evolution of Penn’s image-making practice, bringing together a selection of the artist’s iconic fashion photographs as well as his surreal, dreamlike colour images of flowers, fruit, and other subjects.

Among the highlights in the presentation is the 1949 work Girl Behind Bottle, which Penn made by way of his complex technique for platinum-palladium prints, one of his many innovations in the darkroom. This photograph shows a silhouette partially distorted as it is reflected through a glass bottle, exemplifying Penn’s skillful direction of the gaze through lighting, internal frames, and different blurring and fragmenting methods.

A gelatin silver print in the exhibition, titled Balenciaga Rose Dress (1967), reflects the artist’s ability to forge resonant images that transcend the pages of magazines to the walls of museums and galleries. In this work, Penn captures the billowing, contoured forms of an ornate gown. Also included in the show is the 1995 dye transfer print Bee on Lips, a colour image that speaks to the artist’s defamiliarisations of the everyday through juxtapositions, unusual poses, and plays of scale. Depicting a bee atop a woman’s closed mouth, painted in a vibrant poppy lipstick, this work possesses a surreal, ineffable quality unique to Penn’s oeuvre.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Pace will collaborate with the Norton Museum of Art to present a conversation about fashion photography between Barbara London, former curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and founder of MoMA’s video program, and Stefano Tonchi, ICP Board Member and PALMER Editorial Director