UBS and Annie Leibovitz announced at a press conference in London today that ‘WOMEN: New Portraits’, an exhibition of newly commissioned photographs by the world-renowned photographer, will open to the public in London on 16 January 2016 at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. The exhibition will travel to 10 cities over the course of twelve months – London, Tokyo, San Francisco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Istanbul, Frankfurt, New York, and Zurich. Access will be free to the public.
The new work is a continuation of a project Leibovitz began over fifteen years ago. Her most enduringly popular series of photographs, ‘Women’, was published in 1999 in a book accompanied by an exhibition that opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Susan Sontag, with whom the original project was a collaboration, called it ‘a work in progress’. ‘WOMEN: New Portraits’ will reflect the changes in the roles of women today. In addition to the new photographs, the exhibition will include work from the original series as well as other photographs taken since.
Annie Leibovitz said: “It is extraordinary to do this work for UBS on a subject that I really care about. It is such a big undertaking and a broad subject, it is like going out and photographing the ocean.”
Aligned with the focus UBS places on education, free learning programmes will accompany the exhibition. These initiatives will explore ways of seeing through photography, working with young people in local schools and communities. A Teachers’ Manual and Children’s Activity Guide will also be made available. The full public programme will be announced in December 2015.
The new photographs will form part of the UBS Art Collection – one of the world’s most important corporate collections of contemporary art comprising more than 30,000 works.
Hubertus Kuelps, Group Head of Communications & Branding said: “We’re delighted to have commissioned this new body of work and exhibition tour. Annie Leibovitz is the leading portrait photographer of our time and we are excited to be bringing this project to a global audience. It fits with our long-standing support of projects that encourage engagement in contemporary art and we hope it will inspire people to create.”
Annie Leibovitz (b. 1949) has been making powerful images documenting popular culture since the early 1970s, when she began working as a photojournalist for Rolling Stone. She became the magazine’s chief photographer in 1973, and ten years later began working for Vanity Fair and then Vogue. Her large and distinguished body of work encompasses some of the most well-known portraits of our time. Exhibitions of Leibovitz’s work have been shown at museums and galleries around the world including the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Brooklyn Museum; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; the National Portrait Gallery in London; and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her work is held in museum collections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. to the National Portrait Gallery in London. She has published several collections of photographs and is the recipient of many honours. In 2006 she was made a Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. In 2009, she received the International Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the first Creative Excellence Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and the Centenary Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in London. In 2012, she was the recipient of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Award to Distinguished Women in the Arts and the Wexner Prize. In 2013 she received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities. She has been designated a Living Legend by the Library of Congress.
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