David Zwirner

Heavenly Bodies presents three photographs from a series of works by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, originally created on the occasion of Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, The Costume Institute’s critically acclaimed 2018 spring exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Featuring models wearing ornate and refined clothing taken directly from the exhibition, diCorcia’s images weave together rich displays of visual elegance with subtle references to historical works of art and broader social realities. 

Unseen since their initial publication in Vogue in 2018, these photographs are being made available here for the first time. The artist and David Zwirner will donate one edition of each work to The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Photography Department.

We are pleased to reopen the Paris gallery with an exhibition of photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia. The exhibition features images from a series of eleven editorial projects that the artist created for W magazine between 1997 and 2008, including several photographs that have never been exhibited before.

In 1997, diCorcia began traveling around the world to produce the photographic essays in collaboration with W magazine's creative director, Dennis Freedman. Depicting his own models as well as people cast on the spot, these images weave together richly loaded narratives and sometimes appear far removed from the fashion industry’s traditional emphasis on formulaic beauty and harmony.

Instead, they involve a delicate balance between glamour and grit, imagination and irony. Photographing in Bangkok, Cairo, Havana, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, São Paulo, and St. Petersburg, diCorcia created distinctive series that are rife with ambiguous meanings and loaded connotations as characters appear and reappear in myriad settings.