Camera Work presented FACE/Project Tina Berning und Michelangelo Di Battista September 4 - October 30, 2010

Camera Work Gallery showed a solo exhibition of the artists Tina Berning and Michelangelo Di Battista in Berlin for the first time.

Image: Tina Berning and Michelangelo Di Battista
Mirte, China Ink and crayon on ditone print, unique copy, 2010

More than 30 works, solely unique pieces in the exhibition. Within their collaboration, Tina and Michelangelo blur the boundaries between fashion photography, drawing and painting.
The two artists met for the first time on occasion of a photo shoot for Vogue Italia in the summer of 2007. The two started working together and quickly realized the great potential of their creative collaboration. During the shooting Tina Berning and Michelangelo Di Battista noticed that they had entered a territory together which had already previously captured each of them individually. Ignoring the computer's possibilities for manipulation, they combined their fields of works, photography, and drawing, anachronisticall in an analogue way.
Michelangelo's portraits of women (including super models Claudia Schiffer, Amber Valletta and Julia Stegner) complemented by Tina's applications, comments, and paitings, seem to function as a stock-check and an analysis of contemporary feminine beauty. By merging the two disciplines, the superficial masquerade is being destroyed and the portrayed women are thus given a new level of complexity. The drawings engage with the photographs and let the images become complex blueprints of the essence of the portrayed.
In their work two artists create a subjective, critical but at the same time tender view on women.
This large-scale continuation of their artistic collaboration for Vogue Italia displays the hubris and frailty of femininity, which is reflected on the surface of the media. The photos reveal the challenging, yet at the same time sublime charisma of women portrayed.

They seem to dissolve from their medial image to reemerge precisely through them, powerful and musing, sensitive and beautiful, mature and self-determined.