RENDEZ-VOUS explores the thirteen-year friendship and intimate creative collaboration between the late British designer Lee Alexander McQueen and French photographer Ann Ray (also known as Anne Deniau), who McQueen personally selected to document his making process and behind-the-scenes experience of his runway shows. The exhibition features photographs taken by Ray between the years of 1997 and 2010, reflecting her unique relationship with McQueen, alongside garments McQueen gifted to her over the course of their work together. RENDEZ-VOUS will also feature over two dozen McQueen works, made within his lifetime, from Barrett Barrera Projects’ expansive collection. 

Ann Ray

Ann Ray is a French visual artist. She is self-taught in photography except for alternative processes which she studied during her studies at Central Saint Martins in London. During the late nineties, she lived in Tokyo and London, where she forged an unbreakable relationship with Lee Alexander McQueen, whom she immediately recognized as a pure artist. This was the start of an intense friendship and artistic collaboration that was as prolific as it was unique. He gave her carte blanche on the basis of a simple agreement between friends. From 1997 until the designer’s tragic end in 2010, Ann Ray’s caring gaze captured the spirit of the man and the essence of his work in many intimate situations: portrait sessions, at work in the studio, during performances – images of truth that reveal McQueen’s creativity.

 Ann Ray first revealed part of her work with McQueen to the public during the exhibition Les Inachevés: Lee McQueen, at the 2018 edition of the Rencontres d’Arles. In 2019, she presented an exhibition at Ca’Pesaro in Venice, Blind Faith, showing a series of portraits she took of different artists with their eyes closed. For more than ten years she has collaborated with many choreographers, dancers and opera singers for the Opéra de Paris and Metropolitan Opera of New York.

 Filmmaking and writing are also among her tools of expression. She is currently working on a creative documentary, a fiction movie and is preparing the publication of a collection of poems and images, as well as her first novel. Ray is definitely a storyteller.