Muses

Kamel Mennour is pleased to present Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Muses”, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the Gallery (60 rue mazarine). The exhibition presents a new serie of painted black and white photographies of his muses, such as Kaori and Lady Gaga.

Nobuyoshi Araki was born in 1940 in a working-class area of Tokyo. At the age of 12, he received a “baby pearl” camera from his father, an amateur photographer, with which took his first snapshots. He worked as a cameraman for 10 years with the Dentsu agency, before deciding to take his work in a more personal direction at the
beginning of the 1970s. In 1971, he married Yoko Aoki and published “A sentimental journey”, a compilation of photographs taken during his honeymoon.

Fascinated by the fundamental and inextricable triangle of sex, life, and death (it is to him we owe the words “I was no sooner out of my mother’s womb than I turned around and photographed her vagina”), Nobuyoshi Araki is tireless as a photographer, obsessed by women, often bound, and flowers, captured in the all the intimacy of their coloured folds.

“I want to tie up reality, because I can’t tie up anything else. Not the heart of Yoko, the woman I love, nor that of anyone else. You can’t tie up the soul. It’s untouchable. And it’s because the soul is untouchable that I want to tie up the visible; to take possession of it for myself. “Today, there are too many robots, and fewer voices which come from the flesh. What I want to photograph is disappearing. When the world is in bad shape, the same is true for photographs. They become
uninteresting. This is my epitaph for the end of the world.”