Tyler Shields “Rear View” Edition of 3
C-Print
30" x 40"
Tyler Shields “The Mystery of the Helicopter” Edition of 3
C-Print
30" x 40"
Tyler Shields "Let Them Dance" Edition of 3
C-Print
27" x 40" | 48" x 72"
Tyler Shields "Quatrefoil" Edition of 3
C-Print
22.5" x 30" | 45" x 60" | 62 x 84"
Tyler Shields "Let Them Eat Cake" Edition of 3
C-Print
22.5" x 30" | 45” x 60” | 56" x 77"
Tyler Shields, "Butterfly" Edition of 3
C-Print
13.5"x 18" | 22.5"x 30" | 30" x 40" | 45" x 60"
Tyler Shields, "Chanel Acid" Edition of 3
C-Print
15"x 15" | 30"x 30" | 45" x 45" | 59" x 59"
Tyler Shields "Under The Rain" Edition of 3
C-Print
30" x 30" | 45" x 45" | 59" x 59"
Tyler Shields, "Lace" Edition of 3
C-Print
18"x 18" | 30"x 30" | 45" x 45" | 59" x 59"
Tyler Shields, "Chanel Champagne" Edition of 3
C-Print
15"x 15" | 30"x 30" | 45" x 45" | 59" x 59"
Tyler Shields "Bunny" Edition of 3
C-Print
22.5" x 30" | 40" x 60" | 56" x 77"
Tyler Shields "Prada Popcorn" Edition of 3
C-Print
20" x 30" | 45” x 60” | 52” x 70”
Tyler Shields "Orchid" Edition of 3
C-Print
22.5”x 30” | 30”x 40" | 45” x 60” | 54" x 72"
Tyler Shields, "The Mystery of the Mouth" Edition of 3
C-Print
22.5"x 30" | 30"x 40" | 45" x 60"
Tyler Shields "Acrylic" Edition of 3
C-Print
15"x 15 | 30"x 30" | 45"x 45" | 59"x 59"
Tyler Shields "Pan Am Flight 62 Moon Landing"
Edition of 3, C-Print
22.5"x 30" | 30"x 40" | 45"x 60"
Tyler Shields "Semi Gloss Mouth" Edition of 3
C-Print
15"x 15 | 30"x 30" 45"x 45" | 59" x 59"
Tyler Shields "Cigar" Edition of 3
C-Print
20"x 30" | 40"x 60" | 48"x 72"
Tyler Shields, "Barbie" Edition of 3
C-Print
18"x 19" | 30"x 30" | 45" x 45" | 60" x 60"
Tyler Shields, "Girls On The Beach" Edition of 3
C-Print
30" x 40"
Tyler Shields, "Chanel Legs" Edition of 3
C-Print
18"x 19" | 30"x 30" | 45" x 45" | 60" x 60"
Tyler Shields, "Moonlight Sonata" Edition of 3
C-Print
18"x 18" | 30"x 30" | 45" x 45" | 59" x 59"
Tyler Shields, "Pull" Edition of 3
C-Print
18"x 18" | 30"x 30" | 45" x 45" | 59" x 59"
Tyler Shields, "Red and Gold" Edition of 3
C-Print
18"x 19" | 30"x 30" | 45" x 45" | 60" x 60"
Tyler Shields, "Pop Art" Edition of 3 SOLD
C-Print
18"x 19" | 30"x 30" | 45" x 45" | 60" x 60"
Born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1982, Tyler Shields is a contemporary artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, nicknamed "Hollywood's Favorite Photographer".
Tyler Shields has evolved from the "bad boy of photography" to an artist at the forefront of his artistic medium by producing images that play on notions of gaze, power structures, hyperrealism. Through his iconoclastic style and his film practice, Tyler Shields captures a new vision of American life.
As an artist who has worked with a number of Hollywood personalities, Shields' work has much more to do with his controlled fabrication of subconscious images, in the vein of Caravaggio's almost photographic paintings of the 16th century. Where the rules and guidelines of the century were abandoned and reintegrated to challenge the sensibilities of the time.
Shields' work is not about celebrity, but about colleagues and friends in his social sphere who want to make art and who share an obsession to create. He attempts to move through the complexities and layers of the "celebrity" sphere in an intrinsically tangible view of portraiture with its meaning and context in a shifting landscape of identities that has been accumulating throughout the 21st century. What does it take for an image to capture your attention through the deep gaze of time and the ever-increasing attention to the platform of contemporary art, now? Tomorrow? A thousand days from today? Or a thousand "likes" from now?
Felicity Carter: What is your first memory of art?
Tyler Shields : It is a very strange story I was taken on a field trip to the MOCA in Jacksonville Florida when I was a kid I don’t remember how old I was but maybe 7 or 8. They showed up a collection of paintings and one photograph of the moon landing, they had a moon rock next to the photograph and one of the other kids told me that’s how super man got his powers - just to be clear this was long before the internet and at this point superman was mainly a comic and the movies had just started coming out with Christopher Reeves.
Considered the Andy Warhol of his generation, Tyler Shields has produced images that play with notions of the gaze, power structures, hyper-realism, iconoclastic-tendencies and cinematographic practice, but his Mouthful series of works are among his best known. Sotheby's spoke to him to find out more about his work.
Sothebys: How did this image come about, what led you to create it?
Tyler Shields: I wanted to tell a story with a sequence of mouths. I got really into trying to take a perfect photo of the mouth and when I shoot I am normally looking for one image, but when I was making this I was looking for 16 great shots. It was a different way of thinking. When I saw the first print I knew it could be a special work, The mouth is a the gateway to the mind, and fortunately for me I am not the only one interested in mouths.
If a person like Colton was to do something like this in the 50s it would have been a huge faux pas,” says photographer Tyler Shields about his latest work, a series of photographs featuring Arrow co-stars Colton Haynes and Emily Bett Rickards in 50s-inspired clothing . . . with a major twist. Everyone could have expected that Haynes would fit perfectly into the tailored 1950s suits, but who would have guessed he would fill out the women’s dress just as well?
Well, Shields would have, actually. “The interesting thing about the vintage dress we used is the cuts they used to use fit him so well,” Shields says about Haynes, whom he’s known for several years. “It was when we were talking about shooting Colton in the vintage women’s suit that the idea to shoot Colton and Emily in each other’s outfits came up. I think it speaks a lot to the time we are in right now as androgyny is a two-way street.”
Tyler Shields' "Suspense," an exhilarating array of images that began with a shot the photographer took of himself backflipping across train tracks in the middle of the desert, was originally planned as a series of self-portraits. But then Shields' previous muse Emma Roberts and girlfriend Francesca Eastwood learned of the project and immediately wanted to get in on the action.
Shields was initially concerned that the concept of subjects posing midair was too precarious to enlist others. "I was like, it's really not very safe. It was the first time ever in my life that I was dissuading people from doing something," he recalls in an interview with The Huffington Post. But Roberts and Eastwood were insistent. "So I thought, okay we’ll go out and we’ll shoot, and they'll want to give up after about 10 minutes. Eight-and-a-half hours later, we had shot the entire day."