The Portrait(s) festival takes over Vichy every summer with a demanding photographic program, as it does again this year: from Yohanne Lamoulère to Paul Graham, and including Studio Harcourt and its iconic photo booths. But this 2026 edition puts David LaChapelle in the spotlight, in a setting worthy of his extravagance.
Some photographers observe reality; David LaChapelle, however, stages it. For his first major French exhibition since the one at the Monnaie de Paris in 2009, the photographer unveils around one hundred works at the Grand Établissement Thermal in Vichy, spanning four decades of a career as unclassifiable as it is spectacular. The choice of venue is not insignificant: this early 20th-century thermal spa , with its architectural grandeur combining domes, ceramics, and glazed tiles, provides an almost natural setting for an artist who has always treated the Baroque as a mother tongue.
The solo exhibition begins where it all started: with LaChapelle's early figurative compositions and fashion images from the 1980s, marked by his seminal collaboration with Andy Warhol. It was within the orbit of Pop Art that LaChapelle forged his visual vocabulary, his ability to transform even the most gaudy surface into a biting commentary on consumer society. His early celebrity portraits already stand as manifestos: the saturated colors, the theatrical staging, the corrosive humor concealed beneath the extravagance.
David Bowie: Self-Preservation, 1995
What the retrospective reveals with new clarity is the spiritual depth that runs through the entire body of work. Beneath the glitter and the idealized bodies, LaChapelle constantly explored the notions of desire, transcendence, and redemption.
His best-known allegories, his compositions inspired by Flemish Golden Age painting or that of the Italian Renaissance, are not provocations for the sake of scandal. They pose questions that our era prefers to avoid: what do we truly venerate? What do we sacrifice on the altar of visibility?
The highlight of the exhibition is a monumental, previously unseen series of works inspired by classical fresco techniques. On this scale, LaChapelle's work enters another dimension. We are no longer looking at a photograph; we are confronted with a complete pictorial proposition, where every detail has been conceived with the meticulousness of a Renaissance painter and the audacity of a child of pop culture. It is precisely in this tension, between the sacred and the vulgar, between the eternal and the ephemeral, that the power of a work that refuses to choose sides resides.
Small Landmarks: Reflecting, 1995
Forty years after his debut, David LaChapelle remains one of the rare artists capable of making Madonna and Michelangelo coexist without either losing their dignity. In Vichy this summer, his world overflows the walls with a rare generosity.
14th edition of Portrait(s): “David LaChapelle”
Large thermal establishment
General Dwight Eisenhower Avenue, Vichy
From June to 19 4 2026 October
@david_lachapelle
