NYAB Event - Nico "New York, New York"

Nico "New York, New York"

Rooster Gallery

This event has ended.

Rooster Gallery’s opening exhibition for the 2012/13 season, celebrates the life of Nico (Christa Päffgen, 1938, Cologne, Germany – 1988, Ibiza, Spain), a heroine whose life in New York City is intimately connected to the Lower East Side and the East Village.

The exhibition borrows its title from a filmed rendition of the song “New York, New York” by Nico and is comprised of photographic works by photographer and film director Jerry Schatzberg (b.1927, New York). Portraying distinct moments in Nico’s life, the exhibition is divided between both floors of the gallery.

This exhibition consists of “fantasy” fashion shots taken by Jerry Schatzberg in 1961 depict Nico’s arrival in New York and her career as a commercial model. This never-seen-before photography was not made for a magazine but for pure pleasure due to Schatzberg and Nico’s friendship. On them he was able to capture Nico’s unmatched beauty and flawless features, as well as the mix of young naïveté and self-assurance that also impressed Federico Fellini, leading him to include her in his masterpiece “La Dolce Vita.” These works, which capture the essence of the 1960s, stand in contrast with a film from 1981 of Nico singing “New York, New York.” On Nico’s jaded rendition made for Squat Theater’s “Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free” – which typifies the epochal Squat Theatre’s idiosyncratic cultural references - one will finally meet the underground empress who turns burnout into flare-up and perceive her nihilistic degradation.

Schatzberg’s photography presents a less known period of Nico’s life before integrating Andy Warhol’s Factory, her association with The Velvet Underground and the reinvention of her personality characterized by her Germanic unapproachability. On Schatzberg’s works, one will feel the joie-de-vivre of a 23-year-old woman who has just arrived in New York City.

“Nico: New York, New York” chronicles the arrival in New York of one of the 20th century’s last bohemian artists, whose multidisciplinary and unclassifiable career crossed modeling, music and cinema.

Jerry Schatzberg, after a decade of apprenticeships and studies with the art director Alexey Brodovich, became a sought-after photographer because of his fresh, “street style” approach to fashion. His works appeared in renowned publications such as Vogue, Esquire and Life. He is also responsible for one of the most famous record covers in rock-and-roll’s history — Bob Dylan’s ”Blonde on Blonde” (1966). In 1970, Jerry Schatzberg, the Chekhov of American cinema, directed his first movie and in 1973 won the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prize with “Scarecrow.”