Galerie Kitsuné is pleased to present ‘Imagined Realities’, an exhibition by British artist-photographer Alice Hawkins.

In ‘Imagined Realities’, Hawkins presents cinematic large-format photographic portraits made across America and Europe – including some of Maison Kitsuné ‘Daytime Tails’ capsule collection by designer Olympia Le-Tan campaign. For twenty years, Hawkins has worked between the worlds of fine art and fashion photography, exhibiting in art galleries alongside publishing in journals like Vogue, Love and Pop. Across the last twenty years she has created portraits in five continents, with ‘the audacity that photography needs’, in Nick Knight’s words.

Hawkins creates portraits in the truest sense of the term. She only shows us people who achieve complete individuality, and whose distinctive identity is unmistakable. Her works are paeans to the brave, the bold, and the beautiful amongst us: those individuals who brazenly hold and present themselves to the world. Hawkins describes her role as to encapsulate and celebrate their unabashed sense of glamour and their uniqueness: their larger-than-life selves. For both Hawkins and her sitters, ‘all the world is a stage’.

Hawkins exploits the promise of photography: its capacity to seduce. Her works inhabit a spirit of adventure and exploration and of encounters with strangers who are extraordinary and glamorous. This imaginative world is of a demi-monde of sun-kissed swimming pools and frou-frou hotel rooms – occupied by women confident in their selves and sexual identities. Each sitter inhabits an alluring ‘cinematic time’, as if in a parallel universe where women have a bodily autonomy not yet possible, or even thinkable in our own.

RSVP