HUGO BOSS to Sponsor Bailey's Stardust Exhibition at National Portrait Gallery

Selected by the photographer, Bailey's Stardust (February 6 - June 1, 2014) will be one of the Gallery's largest scale photography exhibitions, with over 250 portraits.

As well as including new work, this remarkable exhibition showcases a wide variety of Bailey's photographs from across a career that has spanned more than half a century. The portraits have been personally selected by Bailey from the subjects and groups that he has captured over the last five decades: actors, writers, musicians, politicians, filmmakers, models, artists and people encountered on his travels; many of them famous, some unknown, all of them engaging and memorable. Bailey will be providing new silver gelatin prints of these black and white portraits especially for the exhibition.

"David Bailey is a master in his field. Photography and fashion are highly intertwined and therefore we are very honored to be able to support this career-spanning and unique exhibition", says Gerd von Podewils, Senior Vice President Global Communication at HUGO BOSS AG. As arts and fashion are both inspired by a desire to capture the spirit of their time HUGO BOSS has initiated an international program committed to supporting the arts almost two decades ago. Over the years this has spawned numerous high-profile exhibitions and partnerships. Bailey's Stardust represents an exciting new element to these activities.

Bailey's Stardust is structured thematically, with iconic images presented alongside many lesser-known portraits, its title reflecting the notion that we are all made from, and return to, 'stardust'. Bailey's work is presented across a series of contrasting rooms - from the glamorous to the impoverished, the famous to the notorious - and through images of skulls and pregnancy, powerful meditations on birth and death. Rooms devoted to striking portraits of The Rolling Stones and Catherine Bailey contrast with remarkable documentary photographs from the photographer's expedition to Papua New Guinea in 1974 and moving images of those devastated by the famine in east Africa, taken in support of the Band Aid charity in 1985.

HUGO BOSS has organized numerous notable exhibitions and, in conjunction with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, established the HUGO BOSS Prize in 1996. In 2013 the prize was complemented by the HUGO BOSS ASIA ART Award, which is being realized in collaboration with the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai.