David Bailey Exhibition to sprinkle a little stardust over Edinburgh

BAILEY’S STARDUST is coming to the Scottish National Gallery – but not till Summer 2015!

David Bailey’s landmark exhibition Bailey’s Stardust will be on show in Edinburgh at the Scottish National Gallery in summer 2015, the National Galleries of Scotland announced today. Hundreds of photographs by Bailey, one of the world’s most famous photographers will be on show from July to October 2015. The Scottish showing of the Bailey exhibition has been generously sponsored by Baillie Gifford & Co. Bailey’s Stardust will be on show in Edinburgh 14 years after the lauded 2001 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition David Bailey: Birth of the Cool.

 

• The largest exhibition of David Bailey’s portraits to shown in the UK
• Over 250 portraits including rooms devoted to The Rolling Stones, Bailey’s travels, Box of Pin Ups, Catherine Bailey, icons of fashion and arts – some seen in public for the first time  

 

The landmark exhibition opens at the National Portrait Gallery, London this week (6 February 2014) sponsored by Hugo Boss.  Selected by the photographer, Bailey’s Stardust will be one of the Gallery’s larger-scale photography exhibitions, with over 250 portraits occupying most of its ground floor.

 

One of the world’s most distinguished and distinctive photographers, David Bailey has made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts, creating consistently imaginative and thought-provoking portraits. As well as including new work, this exhibition contains a wide variety of Bailey’s photographs from a career that has spanned more than half a century.

 

The portraits have been personally selected by Bailey from the subjects and groups that he captured over the last five decades: photographers, actors, writers, musicians, filmmakers, fashion icons, designers, models, artists and people encountered on his travels; many of them famous, some unknown, all of them engaging and memorable. Bailey will be making new silver gelatin prints of his black-and-white portraits especially for the exhibition.

 

Bailey’s Stardust is structured thematically, with iconic images presented alongside many lesser-known portraits, its title reflecting the notion that we are all made from, and return to, ‘stardust’.  Portraits of a wide range of sitters – from the glamorous to the impoverished, the famous to the notorious – are presented in a series of contrasting rooms, and through images of skulls and pregnancy, powerful meditations on birth and death.

 

There will be rooms devoted to Bailey’s travels in Australia, Delhi and the Naga Hills, as well as icons from the worlds of fashion and the arts, and people of the East End of London. There will be selections from two of Bailey’s most acclaimed bodies of work: the Box of Pin-Ups, which helped define the 1960s through arresting studies of key figures, and Bailey’s Democracy, in which people visiting his studio were asked if they would agree to be photographed naked.

 

Rooms devoted to striking portraits of The Rolling Stones and Catherine Bailey contrast with remarkable documentary photographs from the photographer’s expedition to Papua New Guinea in 1974 and moving images of those devastated by the famine in east Africa, taken in support of the Band Aid charity in 1985.

 

David Bailey’s many publications include Eye (2009), Is that So Kid (2008), NY JS DB 62 (2007), Bailey’s Democracy (2005),Locations – The 1970s Archive (2003), Chasing Rainbows (2001), Archive One – The 1960s (1999) and Box of Pin-Ups (1964).

 

Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London, says: ‘Bailey’s Stardust is a very special event. It offers an exceptional opportunity to enjoy the widest range of the mercurial portraits created by David Bailey, one of the world’s greatest image-makers.’

 

Christopher Baker, Director, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh added:

‘We are delighted to be hosting this landmark exhibition of the full range of David Bailey’s outstanding photography. From iconic portraits of the 1960s and ‘70s to his later global projects this exhibition will demonstrate the extraordinary range and consistent quality of his work. We are thrilled to share his incredible achievement with Edinburgh during the International Festival of 2015.’

 

Gerd von Podewils, Senior Vice President Global Communication at HUGO BOSS AG, says:

‘David Bailey is a master in his field. Photography and fashion are highly intertwined and therefore we are very honoured to be able to support this career-spanning and unique exhibition.’

 

Sarah Whitley, Partner at Baillie Gifford, sponsor of the Scottish showing of Bailey’s Stardust, added:

“We are very pleased to support excellence in the arts and especially this exhibition – it will be an amazing flagship event for the 2015 Edinburgh Festival.”