Paolo Roversi Birds

Image: Sakua, Paris, 2018. Paolo Roversi via Surface Magazine.

The Italian fashion photographer Paolo Roversi is celebrated in two exhibitions this spring: currently (when open) and until May at MAR Ravenna, Italy, and soon at Dallas Contemporary. Dallas Contemporary's exhibition - Birds - will focus on Roversi’s long standing collaboration with the fashion brand Comme des Garçons and its founder Rei Kawakubo. Roversi was born in Ravenna and the exhibition covers his entire career, including current work.  

Image: Cong Cong, Paris, 2018. Paolo Roversi via Surface Magazine.

Called Birds to highlight Roversi’s use of movement in photography, the Dallas Contemporary exhibition will examine how the Italian photographer has created a unique visual style in which models pose in abstract, mobile ways, often evoking birds landing or taking off. Visitors will encounter colored walls with groupings of photographs in varying sizes when entering the Museum’s galleries and will be able to explore Roversi’s work through one unifying theme in the exhibition - mobility - to foster new connections and interpretations around his oeuvre. On display will be photographs spanning the four-decade creative relationship Roversi and Kawakubo have developed and exploring how these two fashion trailblazers have exchanged ideas and creative philosophies.  

Image: Selvedge Issue 55 cover by Paola Roversi, Model Lisa Cant

The MAR's exhibition, Paolo Roversi - Studio Luce, opens with his first fashion photographs and a series of portraits of friends and artists, alternated with still lifes of stools collected in the street or those of his long-trusted Deardorff camera. Some of his most recent work is exhibited, as well as a series of previously unreleased fashion shots from his decades of work for brands such as DIOR and Comme des Garçons and for magazines such as Vogue Italia.

For more information visit www.dallascontemporary.org and www.mar.ra.it