HANOVER.- In the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany of works by the American photographer David LaChapelle (*1964), the kestnergesellschaft presents a series of new, not yet shown photographs. The series Earth Laughs in Flowers, which was created this year, refers to art-historical visual traditions but never loses sight of LaChapelle’s own artistic language. The large-format still lifes in this series, with titles such as The Lovers, Concerning the Soul, Risk or America, seamlessly take up the principle of exaggeration that characterized the portraits of celebrities like Madonna, Pamela Anderson, Michael Jackson, Björk or David Bowie through which LaChapelle himself has become famous since the 1990s. The portraits always contained art-historical references, along with a fear of emptiness, a love of bad taste, an ugly beauty, but David LaChapelle’s recent works now show an explicit compositional affinity