Saturday, June 21, 2014

Exhibition - "Robert Mapplethorpe"

During my recent stay in Paris I had the opportunity to visit two very interesting exhibitions.
The first one was a retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s work which featured some two hundred and fifty images exploring a range of themes.
They covered every aspect of Mapplethorpe’s art - bronze bodies and flesh sculptures, geometric and choreographic, still lives and anatomical details, bodies as flowers and flowers as bodies, court portraiture, night photography, and eroticism, soft and hard, self-portraiture in all its forms.


Robert Mapplethorpe - Vase

I appreciate the pure lines of the shot.
The research of aesthetic perfection in this image is what made Mapplethorpe a great artist: strong narrative (in my view, missing in this instance) and perfect technical graphic execution.
Robert Mapplethorpe was one of the great masters of art photography.
He was an artist with an obsessive quest for aesthetic perfection.
A sculptor at heart, and in his imagination, he wanted “people to see [his] works first as art and second as photography.”

The works from the photographer’s early career, which close the exhibition, revealed how the path taken by his art was already mapped out in his first Polaroids.


Robert Mapplethorpe - Andy Warrol

Over and above the erotic power that made Mapplethorpe’s work famous, the exhibition presented the classic dimension of the artist’s work and his search for aesthetic perfection from the early 1970s to his untimely death in 1989.
He was an admirer of Michelangelo: he championed the classical ideal - revised and reworked for the libertarian New York of the 1970s - and explored sophisticated printing techniques to create unique works and mixed compositions, which he framed in unusual ways.
The exhibition opened with Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with the skull-head cane: the image of a young man, already old, tragically cut down in the prime of life by AIDS.


Robert Mapplethorpe - Self Portrait

I believe that his portrait reveals how the master shadows gave free rein to his imagination.
"Like a modern day Orpheus, beyond death, he seems alive - although only just - yet already in the afterlife of his work, beckoning us with his satanic cane to follow him into the underworld of his life, in search of his desire."


Robert Mapplethorpe - Self Portrait

This self portrait was my favourite image.
The frame is fantastic, with his left eye and the finger slightly cut, the head just in the up right corner, his smile looking at you depicting the intensity and the lightness of the moment.
I simply adore this shot!

“Photography and sexuality have a lot in common,” explains Mapplethorpe.
“Both are question marks, and that’s precisely what excites me most in life.”
Exploring the photography of the body, he pushed it to the limits of pornography, perhaps like no other artist before him.
The desire in these images - often the photographer’s own desire - also reflects life in New York, as lived by some, in the 1970s and 80s, at the height of the sexual liberation movement.
“I’m trying to record the moment I’m living in and where I’m living, which happens to be in New York. I am trying to pick up on the madness and give it some order.”


Robert Mapplethorpe - Self Portrait

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