The exhibition brings together 30 original plates from the 1973 album Rock Dreams, a selection of works that were extremely successful across Europe and the United States. “We wanted to make a book with rock’n’roll as a backdrop, but also with everyone’s life as a backdrop” (Interview , 1977). Peellaert worked on the plates for over three years, and combined several artistic techniques including airbrushing, projection of photographs, ink, tracing paper, and pastels, to name a few. He succeeded in erasing any trace of manual production which resulted in an almost photographic final image that playfully interacts with the appearance of reality.

Michael Herr writes in the preface to the album “these Rock Dreams are European dreams, most of which evoke an America that is not much more than a dream…Rock Dreams is full of Annunciations, Nativities, Adorations, Passions, Agonies, Crucifixions and Pietàs, full of Temptations and Ecstasies, but there are no Resurrections, because in the world of rock’n’roll, resurrection is only possible in the form of a comeback”.

Regardless of the reality of these famed musicians – Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner – the figures are all depicted in fictitious, often ironic situations. Ray Charles drives a car, his blindness masked by his sunglasses, the absurd illustrated context, while Jerry Lee Lewis appears on a poster behind the young girl in a wedding dress who almost cost him his career.

Rock Dreams examines the imaginary world of rock’n’roll through significant performers, just as Roland Barthes analyzed the new myths of the modern world in his famous essay Mythologies.