In his work for high-profile magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair, as well as numerous portraits of famous faces from show business and the art world, Michel Comte is following in the footsteps of Edward Steichen, Irvin Penn and Richard Avedon. They are the twentieth century's photographic giants. The Swiss photographer does not have to fear comparison with them when it comes to quality and artistic expression. Michel Comte has a masterly grasp of how to cast the right light on the subject he seeks to capture with the lenses of his Linhof box camera, his Pentax or his Leica.
Galleria Gottardo is the first institution in Switzerland to present the photos that Michel Comte has taken in recent years at Formula 1 race tracks around the world. |
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Galleria Gottardo is Banca del Gottardo’s foundation for the promotion of cultural activities, a leading medium-sized Swiss provider of private banking and asset management services. The Ticino-based financial institution has been involved in contemporary art since the early 1960s. It focuses in particular on promoting Swiss artists.
The exhibition in Lugano shows a previously unknown side of the top photographer. Thanks to his almost obsessive determination and his fascination for the Formula 1 circuit, he became the chronicler of Michael Schumacher's unparalleled sporting career. The pictures taken at the many different tracks across the globe offer an insight into a world that shaped our way of thinking at the turn of the millennium: a world of progress, speed and freely flowing emotions.The world of Formula 1. |
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Motor racing is synonymous with high technology. The razor-sharp photographs from Ferrari's workshops bear this out: Michel Comte's detached visual language creates a mood that is otherwise found only in the germ-free operating rooms of top-class hospitals or in high-tech research laboratories, allowing the viewer to taste the atmosphere of precision and assured safety that prevails in the Ferrari workshop.
In sharp contrast to this are the blurred, almost abstract and yet extremely expressive images taken during the races, which directly convey the feeling of immensely high speed. The looks at Michael Schumacher's private life: these photos lure us into a world in which the modern-day gladiator shows his tender side. They are intimate and yet extremely subtle images, testifying to Michel Comte's great capacity for |
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empathy and to a friendship that has grown over the years in which the photographer has accompanied the racing driver with his camera.
Comte's purist approach to his art cannot fail to give the viewer an experience of contrasts – toughness and tenderness, motion and immobility, deafening engine noise and quiet. What makes his pictures so authentic is that he does his work without relying on excessive technical gadgetry.
7 world champion titles, 91 victories, 250 Grand Prix races; Michael Schumacher's track record speaks for itself. To mark the end of the most successful driving career in the history of motor sport, the illustrated book "7 - 91: Michel Comte on Michael Schumacher" encapsulates Schumacher's achievements in over 400 colour and black-and-white photographs, accompanied by texts by Sabine Kehm and Schumacher himself. |
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