23 Portraits of Lady Gaga Coming to NY Art Center

Lady Gaga.
Photo: © 2014 Patrick McMullan Company, Inc.

Last summer Lady Gaga was Marina Abramović’s surprise date at the Watermill Center benefit—the hot ticket event of the Hamptons summer art calendar—but this year she’ll be on view in the galleries.

The superstar pop singer is the subject of a series of 23 video portraits by Robert Wilson, the avant-garde dance and theater director who founded the Watermill Center. That series, titled simply “23 Video Portraits of Lady Gaga” and drawn from his ongoing “Video Portraits” series focusing on famous artists, will be on view at the Hamptons art center beginning July 26—the date of this year’s Watermill summer benefit—the New York Times reports.

Each of the 23 videos features Gaga in elaborate costume and makeup—pretty much par for the course for her—in settings intended to evoke classic art historical works, like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1806 painting Portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière, or Jacque-Louis David’s 1793 painting Death of Marat. The series had its world premiere at the Louvre last November, but will make its US debut at the Watermill Center, where it will be on view through September 14.

Wilson’s “Video Portraits” series has been going for a full decade, with subjects ranging from Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Salma Hayek, and Isabella Rossellini to Macaulay Culkin and a snow owl named Kool.


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