This beauty shoot celebrates the fantasy of Richard Bernstein’s pop art

In 1972, Andy Warhol asked artist Richard Bernstein to join his magazine, Interview. Founded just two years prior, the DIY publication was still in its infancy, passed around art world parties but not yet the culture-setting document it would come to be. Bernstein’s now iconic covers elevated Interview into a new stratosphere, combining collage, photography and paint to create fantastical portraits that magnified celebrities’ beauty into larger-than-life glamour. “He puts wit into the beauties, fantasy into the rich, depth into the glamorous and adds instant patina to newcomers,” Paloma Picasso said of Bernstein’s work.

It’s these defining moments of pop art that make-up artist Andrew Gallimore and photographer Mateusz Sitek wanted to celebrate and pay tribute to in their new shoot. Drawing on Bernstein’s love of hyper glamour and unusual colour placement on the face – inspired by the disco lights of Studio 54 – the pair collaborated on a series of images that burst with colour, life and texture.

“I love Bernstein’s use of colour, almost like modern fauvism – bright pink skin, purple contours, yellow highlights, suggestions of textures. It’s very fantasy glamour,” says Gallimore. “It encouraged me to add a surreal quality and not be restricted to the usual eye, lip, cheek.” Applying almost all the make-up with an airbrush, Gallimore sought to create his own version of Bernstein’s colourful high-contrast highlights and shadows – “like a chromatic chiaroscuro” as he describes it – staying away from black and other usual shades that you might see in a shoot.

Ultimately, he hopes that the series will not only make people feel happy and excited but that it will push us to be more experimental with our own everyday make-up. “Why restrict yourself to peach blush, when you can have green!”

Photography Mateusz Sitek, make-up Andrew Gallimore @agencyofsubstance using MAC Cosmetics, assisted by Craig Hamilton, model Elenie Mae @antiagency, post production Stefka Pavlova