SPREAD ArtCulture caught up with George Horner, an administrator at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery, at Art Basel and talked about David LaChapelle and Dennis Hopper’s new exhibitions.

SPREAD ArtCulture: When did these new LaChapelle images come about?

George Horner: These images were shot in Hawaii recently because David has a lot of land there. It was actually once a nudist colony that he bought years ago. He flew in Michael Jackson impersonators and look-a-likes for this shoot. He was a huge Michael fan and was really affected by his death. The look-a-likes go through real pains in this series, in order to be as genuine as possible.

He’s certainly not poking fun at Michael; he has complete reverence for him, almost to the point of absurdity. Mr. LaChapelle, who never photographed Mr. Jackson, said he wanted to depict the singer as a “martyr crucified by the media.” These photographs are kind of like the three different stages of Michael: Michael in the eighties with the curly hair, then Michael of about two thousand or so, with the light skin, straight hair, and the extreme nose job and chin implants that he claimed he never got. At the end, where he’s actually dead, the glove has fallen off. We’re selling it as a triptych because it’s almost like an altarpiece. Mr. Shafrazi has an incredible eye for installation.

SAC: What of this new Dennis Hopper work?

GH: The photographs are photographs that Dennis took from about 1960 to 1967. Taschen just put out a new book all about the photographs. It was incredible the circles Dennis was privy to, he was a really privileged character, being a movie star. He was an artist then and he’s an artist now. It’s not like this is new work, like he’s decided to take some photographs now. These photographs are forty-five years old. And, you know, he’s a collector. He’s been a collector his whole life and he’s been an artist his whole life. He was one of the first people to buy Warhol, and Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns, and Rauschenberg. He was a real champion of pop art. It spoke to him somehow.

SAC: Why billboards?

GH: So, an early inspiration of the pop artist were billboards. Rosenquist was a billboard artist. A lot of the photographs are of billboards. A number of years ago, Dennis had this idea that he wanted to go full-circle: he had the billboards and he took photos of the billboards and the billboards become photographs and then you take those photographs and you turn them into billboards again. It’s like the full journey. He employs billboard painters to paint them. It’s not that he couldn’t or I don’t know if he has that in him—that’s not the point. It’s really more like paying homage to the old school and to the original inspiration to a lot of these pop people and kind of paying homage to a dying art. There’s fewer and fewer companies that still hand-paint. Everything’s digital now. These particular ones were done by a company we found in Brooklyn called Colossal and they did a fantastic job. Of course Dennis was there every step of the way, it’s not like “Do this, I’m going to walk away.” It wasn’t like that at all. He was really there and worked with them and Mr. Shafrazi did, too. They’re really beautiful.