Frank Horvat: Please don’t smile

The Castell de Vila-seca hosts the exhibition Frank Horvat – Please don’t smile, organised by the Vila Casas Foundation. This retrospective pays tribute to the famous photographer Frank Horvat and more particularly to his fashion photographs, which revolutionized the genre in the 1950s and 1960s.

Frank Horvat is one of the most important practitioners of the second half of the twentieth century, one who found in the image a concrete way of questioning the world and delving into the most secret recesses of the soul,

To mark Frank Horvat’s ninetieth birthday, the Foundation’s president, Antoni Vila Casas, paid tribute to the artist with an exhibition that, designed by the two, traced out his career, highlighted by some of his most outstanding works in the genres for which Horvat is best known, those of photo journalist and of fashion photographer.

The result is a show featuring more than sixty images documenting a long, seemingly timeless period, a time and a space at once both foreign and intimate, familiar. And it is precisely in this disconnect between past, present and future – between the infinite presence of the photographed object and our inherent temporality – in which we appreciate the greatness of Frank Horvat’s art.

We invite you, then, to discover and delight in the photographic work of Frank Horvat, a multifaceted artist with a cultured gaze who broke the rules of the game to adapt to his time. This is a creator who had the wisdom to “humanise” the sophisticated world of fashion to which he devoted himself, winning enormous international recognition.

SOBRE FRANK HORVAT

Frank Horvat (Opatja, Croàcia, 1928 – París, 2020) is one of the most important practitioners of the second half of the twentieth century, one who found in the image a concrete way of questioning the world and delving into the most secret recesses of the soul

Displaying a profoundly humanistic vein and vast technological knowhow, his output is as heterodox as it is unclassifiable. He has explored various photographic registers such as portraiture, documentary, landscape and urban photography. Relentless in his search for motifs, Horvat is not enslaved by any school or technique, and with a career that has led him to reside in Italy, Switzerland, India, England, France and the United States, he has embraced multiple identities and immersed himself in a vast array of styles and situations with many specialisations and periods.