THE ENGAGING EYE OF MARIO TESTINO AT ART MIAMI WITH HOLDEN LUNTZ GALLERY
Holden Luntz Gallery announces The Engaging Eye of Mario Testino, presenting a selection of works at Art Miami from 2 to 7 December 2025, followed by a dedicated exhibition at the gallery's Palm Beach location from 13 December 2025 to 10 January 2026. The exhibition brings together for the first time significant works from Testino’s major series, spanning from his fashion portraits to his most recent series A Beautiful World. Shown together, these images outline the breadth of Testino’s interests and the different ways he observes beauty, identity and cultural expression.
The fashion works include Kate Moss, Los Angeles, 1996 for Harper’s Bazaar. The image comes from “The Surf Report,” an editorial that helped shape Testino’s early fashion language and remains closely associated with the emergence of a new visual rhythm in his work. Also included is a photograph from the monograph MaRIO DE JANEIRO Testino (Taschen, 2009), recently reissued in pocket edition, together with Natalia Vodianova, Moscow, 2008 for British Vogue. Seen together, these works highlight a period in which Testino refined his approach to gesture, clarity and the evolving codes of the fashion portrait. Two portraits photographed for Allure’s Best of Beauty issues in 2008 and 2009, Doutzen Kroes, New York, 2008 and Carmen Kass, Los Angeles, 2009, form part of the selection. Both images examine how contemporary beauty is constructed and recorded in the editorial space, continuing an inquiry that runs through Testino’s portrait work.
Kate Moss, Los Angeles, Hapers Bazaar, 1996
Natalia Vodianova, Moscow, British Vogue, 2008
Marco Vinicius Toscana Lopez and Renato Ferreira, Rio de Janeiro, 2009
A significant component of the exhibition is drawn from Testino’s long-term project A Beautiful World. The project looks at global traditions and the ways cultural identity is expressed through dress, ritual and performance. Portraits from the Ballo dei Pastori festival, photographed in Balestrate, Sicily, in 2020, appear here as part of this wider investigation into community, symbolism and continuity.
As for the works from Testino’s East, Gone Wild and South Americana series; from East, one work depicts men with full traditional tattoos in formal portrait settings and the other comprises floral still lifes arranged against gold screens, exploring the dialogue between human mark-making and natural form. The Gone Wild selection includes Goura cristata, Brazil, 2022. From South Americana, the exhibition presents Vaqueros (I), Casanare, Colombia, 2019, a portrait of a vaquero on horseback that captures the structure, motion and culture of rural equestrian life. Shown alongside the fashion and portrait works, these images expand the vocabulary of Testino’s archive into themes of surface, pattern, animalia and the visual language of tradition.
A 2007 photograph of Sienna Miller in Rome, for the cover story of American Vogue’s September 2007 issue, styled by Tonne Goodman, in an Alberta Ferretti pheasant-feather-and-silk-taffeta coat and a Ferragamo ostrich-feather bag, is also featured. The wide street scene, with Miller standing akimbo among cardinals, was made during the filming of The September Issue, the documentary by R. J. Cutler that followed Anna Wintour through the production of the 2007 edition and observed Testino’s working process closely. The scene is also included in the documentary's trailer. Its inclusion in the show provides a rare insight into a defining editorial moment and places it in direct dialogue with the wider span of Testino’s work.
Sienna Miller, Rome, American Vogue, 2007
Art Miami during Miami Art Week provides the environment for this exhibition, situating these photographs within an international context in which contemporary culture, photography and collecting meet. Across the selection, Testino’s continued attention to the relationships between style, identity and cultural expression becomes clear, offering a precise view of the threads that connect his work across time and place.