Irving Penn

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of photographs by Irving Penn in Gstaad, on view from February 14 to April 6, 2026. This marks the gallery’s debut presentation of his work and its first collaboration with the Irving Penn Foundation.

Irving Penn (1917–2009) stands among the most influential image-makers of the twentieth century, producing photographs that shaped modern fashion, portraiture, and the still life while blurring the boundaries between commercial practice and fine art. Surveying Penn’s work across seven decades, the exhibition showcases a wide range of photographic processes and includes many images originally published in Vogue that have rarely been seen outside the magazine’s pages.

Photographs taken in New York and Paris in 1949 and 1950 exemplify Penn’s singular contribution to the look of postwar fashion, aligning his restrained, architectural compositions with the new silhouettes introduced by designers such as Balenciaga, Chanel, and Molyneux. Working against spare studio backdrops and employing dramatic directional light, Penn distilled fashion into form, emphasizing silhouette, contrast, and texture with remarkable precision. His portraits—represented here by images of Marlene Dietrich (1948) and Grace Kelly (1954)—reveal his ability to convey presence and individuality through subtle adjustments of pose and framing.