Luxury fashion retail platform, Net-A-Porter will now be selling contemporary art in partnership with fine art e-commerce platform ap8.art, which kicks off on 2nd May 2022.
The first series of artworks are 10 framed photographs by legendary French artist and fashion photographer, Guy Bourdin (1928-1991), with each one priced at £1450 GBP. Bourdin’s body of work included many shoots for Vogue and high fashion ad campaigns for the likes of Chanel, Bloomingdales and Charles Jourdan, who became one of his biggest fans and supporters.
The French artist’s works are collected by institutions such as the Tate Modern in London, the Getty Museum and the MoMa. Moreover, his iconic photographs have even inspired musicians such as Madonna, who’s music video, “Hollywood,” is based on the works of Bourdin.
The renowned photographer was among the some of the first to transform the narrative of fashion photography, as his work contained fascinating narratives, dramatic effects with intense color saturation, hyper-realism and cropped compositions. Bourdin’s perspective was “the idea that the product is secondary to the image.”
Often richly sensual, Bourdin's photographs relied heavily on provocation and shock factor. He had constructed a new visual vocabulary with which he associated the goods of haute-couture – without making it just about the fashion. Guy Bourdin was influenced by early photographers of the likes of his mentor Man Ray, Edward Weston, surrealist painters Magritte and Balthus, and Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel.
Guy Bourdin’s photographic works are inspired by culture, cinema, and literature and has a unique way of telling a story, is thought provoking and somewhat provocative. The limited edition collection on Net-A-Porter will offer up less than 100 units of each piece.
In a statement about their partnership with Net-A-Porter, Viola Raikhel, curator and co-founder of ap8.art, said, “When Net-A-Porter approached ap8.art to reimagine what collecting art could look like, I knew we had to distill all that makes art covetable and collectible. Ap8.art is changing the game in terms of art collecting and Net-A-Porter is the perfect partner to highlight the ever-strengthening ties between art and fashion.”
Each piece of work is digitally verified by ap8.art via a “technique of stenographic cryptography, which is unperceivable to the human eye but detectable by digital scanning,” and include a unique certification code registered solely to the buyer and will provide a record of authenticity.
