To enhance Chronorama with fresh perspectives, the Pinault Collection decided to invite four contemporary artists to the Palazzo Grassi to create new work in response to their twentieth-century predecessors. Redux, in Latin, means “brought back, restored, renewed”: this is the mission given to these young artists who, through their work in painting, sculpture, performance, and photography, bring the older works in the exhibition into the twenty-first century, giving them a new meaning and breathing new life into them. Giulia Andreani, Tarrah Krajnak, Eric N. Mack and Daniel Spivakov have been given carte blanche to interpret the legacy of the Condé Nast archives, each in their own way.

We are pleased to be able to show here at the Helmut Newton Foundation the work of Daniel Spivakov, an Ukrainian artist, who lives and works between Berlin and Venice. His monumental triptych introduces photography to his canvas, as a symbolic support for the chromatic explosion that he elicits through painting. Daniel Spivakov uses painting as a mean to repurpose history through the lens of fiction. His source material, a vast collection of found imagery with subject matter ranging from pop culture to personal memoirs, supplies the catalyst for his process. Once an image is selected, its anatomy is adjusted via various forms of digital manipulation before being printed onto canvas. Through painting, the image is stripped of its original context. Often reproducing in his own face, Spivakov exploits our association with self-portraiture as a mechanism to break down objectivity. Spivakov’s work reflects the dominance of the monochromatic image within the Condé Nast archive. Coloring in these photographs allows Spivakov’s work to relate beyond his autobiography.