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Press Release | Narrating the body, Fran Beaufrand - artmedia GALLRY - Miami FL 
Criminal love, Caracas, 2000

Artmedia Gallery is proud to present the exhibition Fran Beaufrand, Narrating the Body included in the program Venezuelan Art Festival Miami 2014, a cultural and artistic event organized in our city for the first time.

Based on a broad criterion, the gallery approaches photography and video art practices with an interest in artistic research on creative processes and distinctive proposals.  This exhibition gathers two genres of Beaufrand’s photographic body of work: portrait and fashion photography, both intensively explored by him with an ample scope of artistic resources.

Beaufrand is equally skilled in black & white and color photography. He can produce a convivial and neat photographic portrait of a young Venezuelan rap singer as well as a blurred, visually undefined feminine nude, both in black & white technique. At the same time, his mastery of combining and using colors allows Beaufrand to get the most audacious and varied blends of them, like in many of his fashion images. However, in some pictures he is able to reduce the number of colors even close to monochrome.

Fashion photography has been the most important professional practice in Beaufrand’s  career. His ability to create astonishing stages often goes along with his talent to explore the ambiguous semblance of a model who plays a character. Furthermore, he has developed a wide view of fashion by employing different elements taken freely from popular to “high” culture, historical to contemporary art, architecture and design. The history of photography has been another source of reference for his imagery. Also, contemporary social values are among the main issues in Beaufrand’s fashion photography as a repertoire of cultural and artistic allusions.

 

About the artist:

Fran Beaufrand has a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas. He started his career as photographer in the mid 1980s, mainly devoted to fashion photography. He has published his work extensively and developed many publicity campaigns. His work has been included in private and institutional collections such as Museo de Bellas Artes, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, and Galería de Arte Nacional, all of them located in Caracas, Venezuela.

About the curator:

José Antonio Navarrete has developed an extensive international career as curator, researcher, and critic of visual arts and culture. His voluminous bibliography focuses on topics of modern and contemporary art, with emphasis on how media technology has affected and transformed art practices. As an artist, he recently presented his first solo exhibition, What images can do.

About the gallery:

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. Located in the Wynwood Art District in Miami, Florida, the gallery’s mission is to exhibit and promote contemporary art. One of the gallery’s central objectives is to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art thru media technology, with photography and video as its core interest.