Gerard Malanga

This exhibition is also the story of a loyalty and friendship between Gerard Malanga and agnès b. In 2004, several prints of the artist were already presented at the Galerie du Jour as part of the collective exhibition Bande à Part, dedicated to this constellation of artists and personalities who have shaped the New York underground scene. More than twenty years later, his gaze returns to the gallery, like a living memory of that time, still as free and intimate.

Born in the Bronx in 1943, Gerard Malanga meets Andy Warhol in 1963, at the age of twenty, thanks to the poet Charles Henri Ford. He then joined the Factory and quickly became one of the central characters of this extraordinary artistic adventure. His career spans music, poetry, film, performance and photography, abolishing the boundaries between disciplines.

In the course of his meetings, Malanga photographs those who embody this era: Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Candy Darling and many others. His photographs do not seek to make icons. On the contrary, they seem to bring them closer to us, seizing the artists in moments of presence, complicity, solitude or abandonment.

Perhaps this is where the special strength of his work lies. Behind the mythical figures, Malanga reveals people of friends, travelling companions, beings met at the turn of an evening, a concert, an apartment or a café. His device becomes a way to keep track of these relationships and this ephemeral community.

I photographed them because they were my friends, because I loved them, because they were there.

Gerard Malanga, photographer

This emotional dimension deeply permeates his work. She makes Malanga’s photography not only an exceptional archive of an era, but also the story of an artistic community, a generation and the friendships that have crossed it. And if this New York scene now belongs to history, it has lost none of its ability to electrify us. In Malanga’s eyes, she remains alive and deeply human.