Miles Aldridge

The Michael Fuchs Galerie presents the solo exhibition "After Cattelan" of the British photographer and artist Miles Aldridge. On the occasion of the opening and the Berlin Art Week, the gallery also hosts a four-day live edition of Aldridge's ongoing Polaroid portrait project "15 Minutes of Fame."

"One day I received a fascinating email from the artist Maurizio Cattelan. He was about to open an exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris and suggested that his exhibition would provide an interesting context for my work. I liked the idea and sent Maurizio some sketches, to which he agreed. We arranged to meet at 7 p.m. - at closing time - in front of the museum to spend the entire night together inside, making images. When I left twelve hours later, at 7 a.m. - just as the cleaners arrived - I had a handful of extraordinary Polaroids to prove the shots I had captured on film."

—Miles Aldridge

"After Cattelan": The iconography of historical and moral significance - of good and evil - transforms into an absurdist boudoir. The image illustrates a postmodern romance and the reacquisition of romantic irony - the color palette of a neo-gothic fantasy: an urgent, persistent desire for spectacle and sensation, ritual, the bizarre, unfettered and uncanny, disruption, exaggerated stylization, play, seduction, overflowing emotion, anxiety, poetry, elegy, wonder, perversity, awe, violence, irreverence, myth, voyeurism, intellectual imagination and wit as well as the lure of the unknown and unfathomable - in the face of technology and time, a shrunken world, and a declared universe. Viewed from the threshold of the new millennium, this rediscovered romance - as mood, instinct and intersection of aesthetic, emotional and intellectual possibilities - appears as a logical artistic development like abstraction; as a countercurrent characterized by disruption and intervention; as a pictorial language of an "end of history", partly fueled by the memory of those poststructuralist and deconstructivist salon games - puns, semiotic collages, appropriation - that characterized postmodern culture. What lies beyond the "Deep Space Industrial Style" of the coolest postmodernism - beyond the crimson songbird on the teapot, the outwardly turned interiors of modern bank buildings, the "Guess what happens now..." [6] - may be an extremely heightened romantic engagement with history and human presence as well as with aesthetic, emotional and cultural events.

—Excerpt from the book "Some Kind of Love" by Michael Brace Well

Miles Aldridge (b. 1964 in London) is a British artist, whose color-intensive, psychologically charged photographs provide a distinctive position between cinema, painting, and fashion, exploring the deceptive promise of luxury and the fictions of modern life. He studied illustration at Central Saint Martins and is among the few photographers still working with analog film.

Aldridge has worked for leading publications such as Vogue Italia, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair and photographed Elton John for the "Icon of the Year" cover of TIME magazine in 2024. He has collaborated with artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Gilbert & George, and Harland Miller. His works are included in the permanent collections of the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the ICP New York, and the Fondation Carmignac and have been the subject of major exhibitions in institutions such as Fotografiska, Somerset House, and the Hangaram Design Museum in Seoul.