A MOMENT WITH BOWIE
This January marks what would have been David Bowie’s 78th birthday, a moment to reflect on an artist who continually reshaped the contours of identity and fame. In the sunroom of the Jonathan Club, The Core Art Gallery presents two portraits of Bowie by Markus Klinko:
“Smoking” and “Meditation,” each of which offers a different facet of the artist’s complex persona.
Smoking, David Bowie - Markus Klinko
Smoking frames David Bowie in a moment of poised contemplation. The cigarette rests between his fingers, freshly lit, its ember a pulse against the backdrop of his deliberate stillness. There is an intensity in his eyes, a reflection of the depth that marked not just his music but his very presence. In Klinko’s portrait, Bowie is not merely performing; he is deciding, weighing the world with the authority of someone who has already bent it to his will.
Meditation, David Bowie - Markus Klinko
Meditation captures David Bowie in a rare moment of stillness. His eyes are cast downward, yet there is no sense of focus on the physical world around him. Instead, his gaze is turned inward, as though he is in conversation with something more elusive. The camera’s vantage point, above and slightly removed, subtly places distance between the public persona and the man beneath, suggesting that Bowie’s presence was never truly of this world, but rather somewhere between it and something higher. In this subdued, solitary posture, Bowie’s presence holds the weight of his artistic legacy—an artist who shaped culture not with grand gestures, but through unspoken revolutions.
Markus & David Bowie
David Bowie would have turned 78 this January 8th 2025, a moment to consider his enduring legacy as a self-fashioned icon. Among the most striking portrayals of Bowie’s layered persona are Markus Klinko’s photographs, which illuminate both the man and the machinery of fame. These images, hailed by the BBC as “the photos that made an icon,” capture Bowie as both subject and collaborator.
Through Klinko’s lens, Bowie emerges as a paradox—intimate yet enigmatic, ephemeral yet enduring. The images compel us to reflect not only on Bowie’s mastery of myth-making but on the exchange between star and photographer that immortalizes such myths. On this birthday, we remember Bowie as more than a cultural fixture; he was a living expression of the endless reinvention of identity. In Klinko’s work, that act of creation remains as vivid and vital as ever. Markus Klinko began collaborating with David Bowie in 2001. Their partnership started when Klinko was commissioned to shoot the cover art for Bowie’s album Heathen. The resulting photographs became iconic and established a creative relationship between the two, with Klinko later releasing a series of Bowie portraits that have been widely exhibited.
