The Fotografisk Center has the pleasure of presenting the French photographer Jean-Claude Bélégou's first solo exhibition in Denmark. A lush sensual tour-de-force on one of art history's great classics, Edouard Manet's "The Luncheon on the Grass".

The exhibition "The Luncheon on the Grass and Bodies" is divided into two separate parts. Heavenly colorful images of voluptuous women playing on the grass, their bodies saturated by the sun's rays, where the omnipresent running water and fruit strewn across the grass play a central role.
Edouard Manet's 1863 painting of two fully-dressed men and a nude woman in the foreground and a nude bather in the background is given a fresh and revitalizing interpretation. The black and white close-ups of the photographer with a woman are also not lacking in sensuality. The series where they each brush their teeth is a beautiful approach to the sexes, body, skin, lips...

Covering his favorite themes, the body and the portrait (or the face), here in close dialogue with each other, Jean-Claude Bélégous work spans the 1980's and 1990's. Bélégous photographs contain an elegant solidarity between self-investigation and the "foreign" body.

After May 1968, Jean-Claude Bélégou studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. He started photographing around 1970 and has published many books since the 1980's examples of which are: Erres, Heading for the Far North with images from Scandinavia.