Heimat. A Sense Of Belonging

Giorgio Armani is pleased to announce a new exhibition at Armani/Silos, devoted to the work of photographer Peter Lindbergh. Entitled Heimat. A Sense of Belonging, the endeavor presents an expansive selection of Lindbergh's work, spanning various decades of both published and unpublished work.

Personally curated by Giorgio Armani with the Peter Lindbergh Foundation, the exhibition pays homage to the powerful affnities between two visionaries whose unique sense of identity has set very personal standards, in art as well as in life. Giorgio Armani and Peter Lindbergh shared values that imbued their respective aesthetics. The appreciation for the soulfulness of truth and a quest for honesty as opposed to artifce, in particular, made them close collaborators since the Eighties and all along their careers.

Focusing on known and lesser known aspects of Lindbergh's work, Heimat. A Sense of Belonging unfolds as a three-sections movement on the ground floor of Armani/Silos. The photographer's unique viewpoint, his idea of space and beauty and his unmistakable aesthetics are revealed, together with the sources of inspiration, in a journey that goes beyond the idea of fashion photography, starting with the portraits of The Naked Truth, expanding with the powerful ambiances of Heimat, settling with the startling rawness of The Modern Heroine.

Lindbergh's understanding of femininity, his interest in personality and proclivity for truth have always set him apart among his peers. There is an inherent honesty to Lindbergh's work that is closely linked to his own Heimat.

The word Heimat, in German, means more than home: it is a place of the heart; it is where one belongs. For Lindbergh, Heimat was the industrial background of Duisburg, with its factories, fog, metal and concrete. Berlin's 1920's aesthetics was another indelible imprinting. Through the flter of a soulful gaze, such sources spawned a sense of raw beauty that marks the photographer's whole œuvre.

The core of the Armani/Silos exhibition revolves around images in which expressive industrial surroundings are more than mere backgrounds: narrative protagonists, as beautifully naked in their truth as Lindbergh's portraits, always stripped bare of artifce, and his idea of the modern heroine as a powerful woman who shows signs of age and time with pride. Within these three movements, Heimat. A Sense of Belonging depicts the complexity and the directness of Lindbergh's work, and its sense of timelessness.

"I have always admired Peter for the consistency and intensity of his work. Timelessness is a quality I personally aspire to, and one that Peter defnitely possessed. With this exhibition at Armani/Silos I want to pay tribute to a wonderful professional companion whose love for beauty represents an indelible contribution to our culture, not just to fashion" says Giorgio Armani.

Known for his cinematic images, Peter Lindbergh (1944-2019) was born in Leszno, Poland, and spent his childhood in Duisburg (North Rhine-Westphalia). He studied fne art in Berlin and free painting in Krefeld, turning his interest to photography after moving to Dusseldorf in 1971. Joining the Stern magazine family along with photography legends Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin and Hans Feurer, he moved to Paris in 1978 to further his career. Lindbergh quickly introduced a form of new realism, prioritizing the soul and the personality of the subjects, thus changing the standards of fashion photography for good, steering away from age and beauty stereotypes. His work is best-known for the simple and revealing portraits, and the strong influences from early German cinema and the industrial surroundings of his childhood.

Since the late Seventies, Peter Lindbergh has collaborated with prestigious magazines including American and Italian Vogue, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar US, Wall Street Journal Magazine, Visionaire, Interview and W. He has photographer three Pirelli calendars, in 1996, 2002 and 2017 respectively, and his work is featured in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), MoMA's PS1 (New York). He has had solo exhibitions at Hamburger Banhof (Berlin), Bunkamura Museum of Art (Tokyo), the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow) Kunsthal Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Munchen, at the Reggia di Venaria (Turin) and at Dusseldorf's Kunstpalast.

Peter Lindbergh has directed a number of critically acclaimed flms and documentaries: Models, The Film (1991); Inner Voices (1999) worth the Best Documentary prize at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2000; Pina Bausch, Der Fensterputzer (2001) and Everywhere at Once (2007), which was narrated by Jeanne Moreau and presented at the Cannes and Tribeca Film Festivals.