ARTIST STATEMENT
The famous “blue pool” at the Pigozzi family‘s Villa Dorane at Cap d‘Antibes has seen actors, models, musicians, and photographers since it was built in 1953. Apart from being the locus of Pigozzi‘s numerous photographs, glamourous birthday parties and Vogue photoshoots have also been hosted there. Color and black-and-white photographs of celebrities including Bono, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Elizabeth Taylor, Naomi Campbell, David Geffen, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Elle Macpherson, Helmut Newton, and Julian Schnabel are brought to life with dramatic light and playful pool-toy props, celebrating the fun and whimsy of the boisterous glitterati.
“The photographs are serious because they don’t try to be . . . the instant becomes eternal . . . when you come across an oasis like Villa Dorane . . . to not stop on our journey for a long breath would be the wrong kind of foolishness.” -Bono
BIOGRAPHY
Jean Pigozzi (born 1952) is a Harvard-educated (class of 1974) Italian Businessman, Art Collector, Philanthropist and Photographer. He lives in Geneva.
Jean began taking pictures age seven. Since then, he never stopped photographing everything around him, which meant friends, dogs, icebergs, himself and a great many celebrities. His first solo exhibition of photography was at Musée d’art moderne, Paris (1974). His photographs have since been shown worldwide; exhibitions of note include “Pigozzi and the Paparazzi” at The Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin (2008), Les Rencontres D’Arles Photographie, Arles (2010), “Johnny Stop” at The Gagosian Gallery, New York, The Moscow House of Photography, Moscow and SEM-Art Gallery, Monaco (2010-2012), “Johnny’s Diary – Photographies de Jean Pigozzi” at Galerie du Jour – Agnes b., Paris (2013); “An Ear for Music, An Eye for Art: The Ahmet Ertegun Collection,” at The Baker Museum, Florida (2013), for the first time in China, in “My World, Jean Pigozzi” at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2014); “Johnny’s Pool” at the Gagosian Gallery, New York (2016), at the Galerie Gmurzynska in St. Moritz (2017), and at the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin (2017). He is the author of the photography books; Journal of the Seventies (1979), Living Feet (1986), A Short Visit to Planet Earth (1991), Catalogue Deraisonne (2010), Pool Party published in 2016 and Me+Co published this year. Jean’s first TV show ‘My Friends Call Me Johnny’ was released in 2014 on Esquire Network.
Over the last 30 years, Jean has put together the world’s largest collection of Contemporary African Art (www.caacart.com). The collection is based in Geneva and has been shown in major museums around the world and is now at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. For the last eight years he also has been collecting Contemporary Japanese Art by young Japanese artists (www.japigozzicollection.com)
