WOMAN showcases the beauty of the female face. Portraits have been at the heart of the work of Jean- Baptiste Huynh for 25 years. WOMAN continues the study he has been performing on faces throughout the ages and the world’s main ethnic and cultural groups since 1996 (China, South Korea, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Mali, Uzbekistan, Peru, Vietnam...)
From 18 February to 11 May 2019, Galerie Lelong & Co. invites Jean-Baptiste Huynh to present WOMAN – Portrait de la beauté, a series of mostly hitherto unseen photographs, in its showroom on Avenue Matignon.
“As a visual artist and photographer, it is naturally by looking, by interpreting reality through the use of light that I explore the question of beauty. This has nourished my work since its foundations some thirty years ago, and today is the focus of the photographic study I am carrying out on the beauty of the female face in its universality, its authenticity and its timelessness around the world. How can we enhance what is beautiful? How can we enhance what isn’t beautiful? Why? Do beauty and ugliness actually exist? In parallel, I am carrying out a series of interviews with personalities from various horizons – an actress, a neuroscientist, a poet, a musician, a great fashion designer, an architect, a gallery owner, a major collector, a model – where I ask them: What is beauty? What is beauty represented by the artist?” Jean-Baptiste Huynh.
Winner of the Villa Médicis Hors Les Murs Prize, the work of Jean-Baptiste Huynh has been exhibited in a variety of galleries and museums around the world. In 2002, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris presented the exhibition Yeux, accompanied by a catalogue bringing together portraits by the greatest international photographers and painters.
The Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris organised a retrospective in 2006 of his travel portraits, Le Regard à l’oeuvre. In 2012, the Musée du Louvre invited him to present a personal exhibition, Rémanence, bringing together images inspired by the museum’s collections. In 2019, the Musée National des Art Asiatiques Guimet gave Jean-Baptiste Huynh carte blanche to conceive an exhibition and the work that accompanied it, according to his inspiration: INFINIS D’ASIE. From 20 February to 20 May 2019, this major exhibition, a retrospective of his work in Asia over the last 25 years, will bring together around one hundred large-format B&W and colour prints. INFINIS D’ASIE is organised around three journeys: a first journey in Asia, a second through the collections of the Musée Guimet, and a third portraying the face of the Asian woman in all its beauty and diversity. This third journey presents work from his latest, previously unpublished, series entitled REFLECTION, dreamlike reflections of faces seen through mercury mirrors and interpreted as if they were constellations.
