Pirelli, let me count the ways, is Jane Bustin’s third solo exhibition with Copperfield, which responds to the tyre brand’s famous pin-up calendar.
“In 1972, in the midst of the burgeoning ‘second-wave’ feminist movement, the French photographer Sarah Moon assembled a cast of panda-eyed sad girls in their chignons and peignoirs and photographed them, idly and melancholically waiting for sex in the Villa des Tilleuls in Paris, a chateau that had formally been the Gestapo headquarters of Nazi-occupied France.
The resulting images, with their nostalgic soft focus and odour of the nineteenth-century bordello, were the basis for that year’s edition of the infamous Pirelli calendar, the first time ever the brand had commissioned a female photographer. Moon’s calendar marked a dramatic departure from the sun-ripened and glistening, pneumatic ‘pin-up’ models on beaches that remain the stock visual identity synonymous with the brand, and the acknowledgement of a growing mainstream feminist consciousness awakened to the ways in which the currency of images in visual culture contributed to the denigration of women in the public sphere.”
Excerpt from the essay by writer Catherine McCormack that accompanies the exhibition
