Escape Munchen – Gregory Crewdson – Picture Wind
Espace Louis Vuitton München
October 11, 2024 – February 22, 2025

The Espace Louis Vuitton München is proud to dedicate its new show to American photographer Gregory Crewdson. Carrying out the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s commitment to mount international projects and reach a broader audience, two exclusive series from the Collection, Dream House (2002) and Cathedral of the Pines (2014), are presented for the first time, within the framework of the Hors-les-murs programme which unfolds at the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka.

Gregory Crewdson is a major figure in photography and has been painting a meditative portrait of middle-class America for three decades, a country whose wide-open eyes have been blinded by the lights of an exhausted dream. His photographs, which combine an autobiographical dimension with the portrait of an America fallen from grace, are inspired by washed-out lights and deserted streets, and staged like movie scenes to produce photographs that seem to be snapshots from non-existent films.

Crewdson blurs the boundaries between cinema and photography, designing his works like film stills, featuring enigmatic characters and situations revealing the dark side of the American dream. His elaborately composed scenes, dramatised by sophisticated lighting in natural or artificial settings, are at once dreamlike and strikingly real, creating a feeling of disturbing strangeness into seemingly familiar contexts. Adopting style elements from film noir, psychological drama and fantasy, his photos deliberately trigger a sense of déjà vu that accentuates their disturbing, hallucinatory quality.

His attraction to the strangeness and mystery concealed by the reassuring appearances of small-town America brings him stylistically closer to David Lynch, particularly Blue Velvet, in which the camera dives into the grass to discover a human ear crawling with ants. Since the mid-1990s and his Hover series (1996–1997), the central theme of his work was established: the day-to-day life of small rural America as a stage for the psychological study of repressed desires, anxieties and fears. The photos’ sobriety and austerity have a vaguely documentary quality, contrasting with the artist’s works that followed, notably including the Dream House series (2002), richer in detail and colour. This series of large-format photos, in nocturnal and crepuscular ambiences, are set at the time of day when the power of reason gives way to dark forces and energies, this time going so far as to penetrate the home. From that moment, Crewdson started working with a complete film crew, like a director, meticulously planning his productions. The works in the Cathedral of the Pines series (2014) signal an important phase because of the intimacy they exude, crystallised by the places where they were made, linked to the life of the photographer, his partner and collaborator Juliane Hiam, and their children

About the artist
Gregory Crewdson was born in 1962 in Brooklyn, New York City, and studied at Yale University in Connecticut, USA, where he is now a professor and the director of the photography programme. He lives and works in New York and Massachusetts. Crewdson stages his photographs like films, using actors, sets, props, people, storyboards and makeup artists. In this way, he addresses the dark side of the American dream as well as his own psychological issues. He believes that only photography always remains silent. There is no before and no after. The events it captures do not unveil their mystery. His work has been widely exhibited and collected by numerous museums, notably in the USA, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,California; The Smithsonian American Museum, Washington D.C.. In Europe, he recently exhibited at the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria (2024); the Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France (2023); the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Italy (2022); the Centre for Contemporary Art in Toruń, Poland (2018); and The Photographer’s Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2018).

About the Fondation Louis Vuitton
The Fondation Louis Vuitton serves the public interest and is exclusively dedicated to contemporary art and artists, as well as 20th-century works to which their inspirations can be traced. The Collection and the exhibitions it organises seek to engage a broad public. The magnificent building created by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, and already recognized as an emblematic example of the 21st-century architecture, constitutes the Fondation’s seminal artistic statement. Since its opening in October 2014, the Fondation has welcomed more than ten million visitors from France and around the world. The Fondation Louis Vuitton commits to engage in international initiatives, both at the Fondation and in partnership with public and private institutions, including other foundations and museums such as the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg (Icons of Modern Art: The Shchukin Collection in 2016 and The Morozov Collection in 2021), the MoMA in New York (Being Modern: MoMA in Paris), and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (The Courtauld Collection. A Vision for Impressionism) among others. The artistic direction also developed a specific Hors-les-murs programme taking place within the Espaces Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice, Beijing, Seoul and Osaka, which are exclusively devoted to exhibitions of works from the Collection. These exhibitions are open to the public free of charge and promoted through specific cultural communication.

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