DECEMBER 2025 ISSUE

DECEMBER

Table of CONTENTS

01

STRAIGHT FROM THE CRATE

02

TIA COLLECTION COLLECTS

03

THE 9-5 WITH GABRIELLA BOYD

04

COLLECTION LENDING PROGRAM

05

CONCLUSION

An analysis of Helmut Newton’s Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny' costume on the terrace of her apartment, New York, 1975 photograph.

From Jadoga Buić to Chris Ofili, new acquisitions of Tia Collection.

An intimate day at Gabriella Boyd’s studio.

News on our latest contributions and lendings.

Mission statement and image credits.

TIA COLLECTION

Straight from the Crate: Helmut Newton Captured against the hard edges of the New York City skyline, Helmut Newton’s “Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny' costume on the terrace of her apartment, New York, 1975” reveals a paradox central to his practice: the collision between voyeurism and agency, fashion and power. A woman in a black bodysuit and towering rabbit ears stands poised on a Manhattan rooftop. Her stance is both assertive and at ease; her face is partly hidden.

Behind her, the city rises in geometric symmetry. The photograph appears cinematic in its composition but achieves its impact through restraint. She is not performing for approval; she is reclaiming space.

Born Helmut Neustädter in Berlin in 1920, Newton came of age in a city defined by Weimar sensuality, cabaret culture, and the collapse of old hierarchies. That environment, with its blend of decadence and danger, informed the erotic charge of his later imagery. After fleeing Nazi Germany and eventually settling in Paris, Newton began working for Vogue in the 1950s and 60s, where his sharply stylised photographs redefined fashion editorial. His women, poised, polished, and often armed with their own gaze, challenged the era’s ideal of passive glamour. As Newton famously stated, “My women are always strong, even when they’re naked.”

“Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny'” exemplifies this duality. At first glance, it appears to reproduce a familiar icon of sexual fantasy: the Playboy Bunny. Yet through Newton’s lens, the cliché is subverted. His composition is austere and architectural. Elsa Peretti’s body becomes a vertical form among the skyscrapers. The eroticism remains, but it is tempered by control, and control is the true subject of the image.

DECEMBER 2025

STRAIGHT FROM THE CRATE: HELMUT NEWTON

TIA COLLECTION

The outfit itself carries a complex history. The original Playboy Bunny costume, introduced in 1960, was first developed by Zelda Wynn Valdes, refined under the supervision of Ilse Taurins, and further adjusted by Renee Blaszczyk and Colleen Creeden for the Playboy Clubs. The corseted satin bodysuit with bow tie, cuffs, and ears quickly became one of the most recognisable uniforms of the twentieth century, a symbol of choreographed desire. By the 1970s, Halston, who had begun his career as a milliner at Bergdorf Goodman before founding his eponymous label, reimagined the Bunny silhouette in line with his minimalist ethos.

Stripping away the sugary palette and hyper-femininity of the original, he created sculptural, monochrome reinterpretations in fluid jersey and metallic stretch. His version was form-fitting but never frivolous, a study in sensual precision. Under Halston, the Bunny evolved from the object of the gaze to its author, embodying a distinctly modern glamour grounded in confidence rather than submission.

Newton’s decision to photograph this Halston-inspired aesthetic was deliberate. The two shared a fascination with the paradox of glamour, how it could function as both armour and allure. In “Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny',” the costume ceases to be a uniform of performance; it becomes a sculptural extension of the body.

While Newton has often been described as fashion photography’s great voyeur, his images resist the simplicity of that label. His work acknowledges the voyeuristic impulse only to turn it inside out. He stages the act of looking, what feminist critic Laura Mulvey termed the “male gaze,” but allows his subjects to redirect it. The women in Newton’s photographs perform for the camera, but with full awareness of its power. Their selfpossession transforms objectification into authorship.

Newton’s women complicate the traditional dynamics of visibility, desire becoming a negotiation rather than a command.

DECEMBER 2025

STRAIGHT FROM THE CRATE: HELMUT NEWTON

TIA COLLECTION

NOUR JAOUDA

Helmut Newton, Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny' costume on the terrace of her apartment, New York, 1975. Printed 1976.

Vintage ferrotyped gelatin silver print 16 by 12.125 inches (40.64 x 30.79 cm)

DECEMBER 2025

STRAIGHT FROM THE CRATE: HELMUT NEWTON

TIA COLLECTION

This dialogue animates “Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny'.” Elsa Peretti’s obscured face withholds intimacy even as her body invites attention. Her posture is relaxed but alert, assertive yet inaccessible. The photograph thus becomes less about the fantasy of the female body than about the performance of control itself. Newton’s women are not simply looked at; they look back, an exchange that destabilises the hierarchy between subject and observer.

The production of “Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny'” also speaks to Newton’s aesthetic discipline. He was never drawn to the excess of the studio. Preferring natural light and real locations, hotel rooms, stairwells, rooftops, he sought out environments where glamour could brush against grit. His black-and-white palette was not a gesture of austerity but of precision. Stripped of colour, his images rely on the sculptural interplay of light and shadow. In “Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny',” her silhouette is echoed by the architecture surrounding her, the verticals of her figure merging with the city’s steel geometry.

This architectural sensibility aligned Newton with contemporaries such as Azzedine Alaïa and Yves Saint Laurent, designers who viewed the body not as a surface to decorate but as an armature to sculpt. Like them, Newton’s focus was on form, the line of the body as an expression of strength. Unlike his peers, he folded irony and tension into that formalism. His photographs are self-aware; they expose the mechanics of desire even as they aestheticise it.

Within Newton’s broader oeuvre, “Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny'” stands as a concise meditation on voyeurism and agency. Here, the Elsa Peretti becomes both subject and spectator. The urban environment, typically coded as masculine, becomes her stage.

DECEMBER 2025

STRAIGHT FROM THE CRATE: HELMUT NEWTON

TIA COLLECTION

In one sense, she embodies the city’s hardness; in another, she softens it, her curves interrupting its linear order. The voyeur, traditionally male and dominant, is symbolically dethroned.

There is also an essential tension between stillness and motion.

Newton’s women appear caught midperformance, their stillness charged with potential movement. They understood the performative power of self-presentation long before that language became part of visual culture.

The photograph transcends fashion editorial and enters the realm of philosophical image-making. It asks fundamental questions: What does it mean to see, to be seen, and to reclaim the act of looking?

Despite the mythology that surrounds Newton’s name, many of his most iconic works were made under modest conditions: borrowed clothes, minimal crews, and locations of opportunity. What imbued them with power was not scale but composition, the calibrated precision of light, line, and psychological charge. “Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny'” is less an act of seduction than one of authorship, the assertion of creative control by both photographer and subject.

Newton’s genius lay in his refusal to provide resolution.

His photographs dwell in ambiguity, beautiful, unsettling, impossible to categorise. “Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny'” is no exception. It reclaims fantasy through authorship, transforming voyeurism into vision. The bunny ears may hint at play, but the posture is power. What Newton captures is not seduction but sovereignty, a portrait of control that remains as arresting today as it was in 1975.

DECEMBER 2025

STRAIGHT FROM THE CRATE: HELMUT NEWTON

TIA COLLECTION COLLECTS

TIA COLLECTION

Jadoga Buić, La Voile (The Sail), 1971.

Wool and sisal 118.125 by 98.1875 inches (299.72 x 249.39 cm)

DECEMBER 2025

TIA COLLECTION COLLECTS

TIA COLLECTION

Chris Ofili, Ovid-Lust, 2011-2012.

Oil on linen 22.04 by 78.74 by 1.57 inches (310 x 200 x 4 cm)

DECEMBER 2025

TIA COLLECTION COLLECTS

TIA COLLECTION

Lisa Brice, After Ophelia, 2018 Gouache on canvas 96.25 by 47.75 inches (247 x 121.28 cm)

DECEMBER 2025

TIA COLLECTION COLLECTS

TIA COLLECTION

The 9-5 with Gabriella Boyd

This month, we turn our attention to the atmospheric, psychologically-charged worlds of Gabriella Boyd, the London-based painter whose canvases operate like interior weather systems: humid, disorienting, and alive with shifting states of being. Born in Glasgow in 1988, Boyd draws from dreams, memory, and the porous boundaries between the body and its environment, creating works that feel both intimate and estranged. We’re delighted to highlight “Floorplan (Green Driver),” 2024. a recent addition to Tia Collection, where her distinctive fusion of figuration and abstraction unfolds with uncanny clarity.

In “Floorplan (Green Driver),” Boyd constructs a spatial puzzle that seems to breathe from within, its chambers and corridors mapped in psychological rather than architectural terms. Figures and forms press against each other, dissolving and re-materializing in washes of green that evoke both safety and unease. As in the work of Francis Bacon or Leonora Carrington, bodies slip between recognition and ambiguity, held in a suspended moment where narrative remains just out of reach. The painting captures Boyd’s remarkable ability to turn the interior landscape (emotional, mental, somatic) into a site of inquiry. Here, she orchestrates a charged tableau that resonates with Tia Collection’s commitment to works that probe the thresholds of perception, offering a floorplan not of a place, but of a state of mind.

9:10 AM: The paintings are no longer alone, the clock begins.

TC: What first drew you to painting as your clearest form of expression, was it the physicality, the psychology, or something else entirely?

GB: Quite early on I was drawn to the time painting gives you. The space between making something privately and then sharing it felt peaceful, like a kind of buffer. I’ve since become more comfortable expressing myself through words, but I used to find the immediacy of speech frustrating. Painting moves differently; its slower pace allows for delay and reflection, for seeing what’s unfolding before I choose to show it.

DECEMBER 2025

THE 9-5: GABRIELLA BOYD

TIA COLLECTION

Gabriella Boyd, Floorplan (Green Driver), 2024.

Oil on linen 70.75 by 157.5 by 1.75 inches (179.705 x 400.05 x 4.4196 cm)

DECEMBER 2025

THE 9-5: GABRIELLA BOYD

TIA COLLECTION

9:53 AM: TC: You’ve described painting as a way of translating what’s interior into something visible. Do you remember when you first realised painting could carry that weight? Do you find it cathartic, or is it something more complex?

GB: It was when I encountered other people’s paintings and books that I realised you can enter someone’s interior world through what they’ve made. There’s something very intimate about that kind of exchange, especially in reading.

I do find it incredibly cathartic, yes. It can feel like a release, a way of sorting through and making abstract emotions somehow more tangible. But then, of course, less cathartic questions arise - of how to problem-solve and make the painting work.

11:24 AM: Several canvases are worked on at once, their surfaces layered and re-layered until she reaches what she calls a“believable emotional space.”

TC: You often work on several canvases at once, and they seem to influence one another. Has this dialogue between works always been intentional, or did it develop naturally over time?

GB: Working across multiple canvases keeps things open and alive.

It allows me to act impulsively and respond to the shifting tone and energy in the room. That energy becomes a foundation to build from.

Over time, it starts to feel like world-building, each work in dialogue with the others. My task is to find the connective tissue between them, a kind of visual language made of associations.

TC: You’ve said you work “through intuitive and formal problems until you get to a believable emotional space.” What does reaching that point feel like in the studio?

GB: It’s often the most satisfying part of the process. The painting takes on its own atmosphere; there’s a rhythm across the surface that anchors the tone or story. When it reaches that stage, it feels independent of me, like it’s operating on its own internal logic.

DECEMBER 2025

THE 9-5: GABRIELLA BOYD

TIA COLLECTION

TC: In your practice, does meaning emerge primarily through layering and reworking, or do you sometimes begin with a clear sense of what a painting will become?

GB: I was thinking about this recently. How searching for image through the process could make representation feel secondary, but in fact, the opposite feels true. As if finding the meaning through making somehow gives the found image its weight - like it's bound to the foundations of the painting and couldn't have been any other way.

2:17 PM: Creepers climb across façades and morph into nerves, diagrammatic rooms dissolve into bodies, and bursts of orange or pink pierce muted grounds.

Light is both subject and atmosphere, shifting with the north-facing windows of her studio.

TC: Motifs like creepers, diagrammatic rooms, and bodily forms recur throughout your work. What keeps drawing you back to them?

GB: I’m drawn to the speed and impulse of annotations, floorplans, or crude medical drawings, within paintings that operate, as a whole, at a much slower sense of time.

In my painting “Floorplan (Green Driver)” the central white form radiates energy. Printed in red paint with a rough stamp made of canvas, these cell-like forms are motifs I keep coming back to. Before even starting a painting, they create a tension between micro and macro scales. They suggest cells, textile, skin, or visual decay: a nod to painting as an optical experience.

I was thinking about control and surrender: inhabiting a body, living with forces beyond your command. Bone marrow, sperm, ideas of sickness, accident, fertility, and the quiet humour in accepting lack of control.

DECEMBER 2025

THE 9-5: GABRIELLA BOYD

TIA COLLECTION

5:20 PM: Boyd continues to explore the translation of dreams, memories, and invisible energies into paint, asking how far she can make solid what has no matter, the space between people, the aura of a room, the sensation of thought itself.

TC: Do you have any current obsessions or recurring fixations?

GB: Lately I’ve been thinking about the relationship between tonal shifts in colour and changes in pitch. I’ve never sung out loud that much (we weren’t a big singing family), but now I have a sevenmonth-old daughter, and every night I hum to help her get to sleep.

The rhythm and register and vibration, the repetition, the decision to stay within a narrow range or to break into higher or lower notes. It all makes me think about painting in its simplest form: a series of small intuitive moves one after the other to form a mood.

DECEMBER 2025

THE 9-5: GABRIELLA BOYD

TIA COLLECTION

Gabriella Boyd (b. 1988, Glasgow) is a Scottish artist based in London. She studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art before completing her postgraduate training at the Royal Academy Schools, where she was awarded the prestigious Gold Medal for Work of Exceptional Quality. Boyd has since exhibited extensively across the UK and internationally, with her work entering major public and private collections. Her career has been marked by notable solo exhibitions, participation in significant group shows, and collaborations with leading galleries and institutions. She continues to live and work in London, contributing to the city’s vibrant contemporary art scene while maintaining strong ties to her Scottish roots.

DECEMBER 2025

THE 9-5: GABRIELLA BOYD

COLLECTION LENDING PROGRAM

TIA COLLECTION

Iris van Herpen, Syntopia Dress, 2024.

Silk, organza, stainless steel, and polyester 643.3 by 43.3 by 15.75 inches (110 x 110 x 40 cm)

DECEMBER 2025

LENDING PROGRAM

TIA COLLECTION

Louvre Couture The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX 11/19/2025 - 3/15/2026

The MFAH positions fashion as art with an installation of 36 fashion ensembles in galleries across the Museum. All were selected from the landmark debut of Louvre Couture-Art and Fashion: Statement Pieces, the first-ever fashion exhibition at the Louvre Museum. The ensembles represent work by contemporary and historic fashion houses and are paired at the MFAH with historic, modern, and contemporary masterworks from the MFAH collections. The Houston presentation also features several rare loans from the Louvre’s holdings of decorative arts.

Ensembles have been selected from heritage houses such as Balenciaga, Chanel, Christian Dior, Givenchy, Versace, Louis Vuitton, and Vivienne Westwood, as well as from important designers established in this century, including Thom Browne, Erdem, Jacquemus, and Iris Van Herpen.

DECEMBER 2025

LENDING PROGRAM

TIA COLLECTION

Eliza Naranjo Morse, A Prayer Making Its Way, 2024.

Acrylic on canvas 48 by 36 by 1.5 inches (121.92 x 91.44 x 3.81 cm)

DECEMBER 2025

LENDING PROGRAM

TIA COLLECTION

Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM 11/7/2025 - 9/7/2026

Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country honors Tewa people, art, culture, and landscapes, while drawing awareness to the erasure of the Tewa presence from the story of Georgia O’Keeffe in Northern New Mexico. Co-curated by artist Jason Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo) and Bess Murphy, Luce Curator of Art and Social Practice at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the exhibition features artists, scholars, and culture bearers from the six Tewa Pueblos of Northern New Mexico: Nambé, Ohkay Owingeh, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Tesuque.

While Georgia O’Keeffe frequently claimed ownership of Northern New Mexico, this land has been the continuous home of these six Tewa Pueblos from time immemorial to the present.

Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country resituates the O’Keeffe narrative back in Tewa Country.

The exhibition brings O’Keeffe’s art and personal objects into dialogue with newly created artworks by contemporary Tewa artists to highlight themes of sacred spaces, belonging, identity, and ownership. Through storytelling and cultural exchange, the project will create a platform for learning about the past, present, and future of Tewa land, and the complexities of O’Keeffe’s own presence in New Mexico.

DECEMBER 2025

LENDING PROGRAM

TIA COLLECTION

Yinka Shonibare MBE, Ms Utopia, 2013.

Mannequin, Dutch wax cotton textile, fiberglass, wire, globe, steel baseplate 69.75 by 43.375 by 27.5 inches (177 x 110 x 70 cm)

DECEMBER 2025

LENDING PROGRAM

TIA COLLECTION

Truths Be Told: Artists Activate Traditions Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, NM 12/07/2025 - 1/15/2027

Truths Be Told: Artists Activate Traditions highlights a dozen international artists who engage with folk traditions from their respective communities in order to critique social inequities, reverse erasure, and be a catalyst for social change. By pushing the boundaries of longstanding ceramic, basketry, and textile practices, regalia, or song, these artists propose more complex narratives of how traditions empower communities. Truths Be Told invites us to consider how traditions can function productively as agents of debate, awakening, change, cultural revitalization, and imagining a better future.

Featuring the work of Roberto Benavidez, Mary Lee Bendolph, Ambreen Butt, Kathryn Clark, Sonya Clark, Nicholas Galanin, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Carolyn Mazloomi, Elyse Pignolet, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, Beverly Y. Smith, Colectivo Subterráneos, Sarah Mary Taylor, Kukuli Velarde, and Marie Watt.

DECEMBER 2025

LENDING PROGRAM

TIA COLLECTION

About Tia Collection Founded in 2007, Tia Collection is a global art collection with a mission to support artists and institutions by acquiring and loaning works of art.

Tia fosters dialogue, stewardship and scholarship of art through its lending program, partner exhibitions, and publications.

For more information, contact us at info@tiacollection.com

I M A G E C R E D IT S :

Cover: Helmut Newton, Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny' costume on the terrace of her apartment, New York, 1975. Printed 1976. © Helmut Newton Foundation/Courtesy of Truck Archive. Tia Collection. Image courtesy of Hamiltons Gallery, London, UK. Page 3: Detail of Helmut Newton, Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny' costume on the terrace of her apartment, New York, 1975. Printed 1976. © Helmut Newton Foundation/Courtesy of Truck Archive. Tia Collection.

Image courtesy of Hamiltons Gallery, London, UK. Page 4: Helmut Newton by Alice Springs, pseudonym for the actress and photographer June Browne. June (Monte Carlo 1982).

Page 7: Helmut Newton, Elsa Peretti in Halston's 'Bunny' costume on the terrace of her apartment, New York, 1975. Printed 1976. © Helmut Newton Foundation/Courtesy of Truck Archive. Tia Collection. Image courtesy of Hamiltons Gallery, London, UK. Page 10 & 11 : Mikayla Patton, Enduring, 2023. © Mikayla Patton. Tia Collection. Photo by Addison Doty, courtesy Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art. Page 12 & 13: Jadoga Buić, La Voile (The Sail), 1971. © Jadoga Buić .Tia Collection. Image courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, UK. Page 14 & 15: Chris Ofili, Ovid-Lust, 2011-2012. © Chris Ofili. Image courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro.

Page 16 & 17: Lisa Brice, After Ophelia, 2018. © Lisa Brice. Tia Collection. Image courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK.

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CONCLUSION

TIA COLLECTION

I M A G E C R E D IT S C O NT I N U E D :

Page 18: Portrait of Gabriella Boyd in her studio. Image courtesy of the artist.

Page 20: Gabriella Boyd, Floorplan (Green Driver), 2024. © Gabriella Boyd. Tia Collection. Image courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Gallery, London, UK. Photography by Greg Carideo.

Page 22: Gabriella Boyd’s studio. Image courtesy of Elephant Art. Photograph © Tim Smyth.

Page 24 & 25 : Details of Gabriella Boyd, Floorplan (Green Driver), 2024. © Gabriella Boyd. Tia Collection. Image courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Gallery, London, UK. Photography by Greg Carideo.

Page 27: Portrait of Gabriella Boyd in her studio. Image courtesy of the artist.

Page 28 & 29: Rosemarie Castoro, Guinness Martin, 1972. ©Rosemarie Castoro. Tia Collection. Image courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, FR. Page 30: Iris van Herpen, Syntopia Dress, 2024. © Iris van Herpen. Tia Collection. Images courtesy of Iris van Herpen Studio, Amsterdam, NL. Photography by Yannis Vlamos. Model: Sabah Koi. Page 32: Eliza Naranjo Morse, A Prayer Making Its Way, 2024. © ElizaNaranjo Morse. Tia Collection. Image courtesy of the artist.

Page 34: Yinka Shonibare MBE, Ms Utopia, 2013. © Yinka Shonibare MBE. Tia Collection. Photography courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery. Photos by Stephen White & Co.

DECEMBER 2025

CONCLUSION