Extra Blond

Alaïa Fonk (1993) has taken several world cities as inspiration for the show. Rome, Paris and Los Angeles, to be precise. Since she was a baby, she has been travelling the world with her father on the trips he made for OBJEKT©International productions. Recently she accompanied him on photography missions featuring the home of DJ Tiesto in Miami and the interiors of the virtuoso designer Orlandi Diaz-Azcuy in San Francisco, as well as co-producing photographs for a book on the Dutch designer Jan des Bouvrie.

As a result, she has developed a love of photography and film over the years. She processes her pictures in a wide variety of projects: from invitations, cards, magazine covers and productions for OBJEKT – all of stunning graphic design. She recently created for OBJEKT©International an advertisement in KLM’s magazine Flying Dutchman.

Her films are usually short documentaries on specific topics. She advises Hans Fonk on graphic and photographic matters and, with him, photographs highly diverse projects. Her work is interspersed with a considerable dash of humour, which is displayed in quite unexpected ways.

She is currently attending the International School of Curaçao, from which she will graduate next year. The show at Bloemnhof Gallery on the Caribbean Island of Curaçao is Alaïa’s first. The works she presents here are large photos and collages, printed on canvass, of the Paul Getty Museum, designed by Richard Meier and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry, in Los Angeles. In addition, she made a collage of pictures of the beaches of Malibu and Santa Monica. In Paris she captured the contours of Opéra Garnier in an unexpected way; in Rome she transformed architectural street scenes into true abstract works of art. A collage she made of Carabinieri is yet another striking rendering, with the addition of her own fingerprint.

Hans Fonk has opted for colourful collages of Curaçaoan scenes for this show. The works are printed on canvass, torn in places and glued together. Hans Fonk started his photographic career as a fashion photographer and, quite by chance, while working in San Francisco, was invited to photograph interiors. He went on to found the international interiors and design magazine OBJEKT©International, which today is on sale in 80 countries and published in English, Dutch and Russian. In 2009 OBJEKT was chosen as the Interior Design Magazine of the Year, in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Hans Fonk is one of world’s leading photographers of interiors and architecture. In addition he undertakes photographic assignments for third parties – for books and websites, including those of Jan des Bouvrie and Qua Associates in the Netherlands, Thierry Despont in New York and Jim Thompson in Bangkok. He has also produced two books on architecture and art on the island of Curaçao which have long been considered to be the works to have.