Robert Mapplethorpe
16 Dec 2007 - 30 Jan 2008
ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE
“Vanitas”
Galería Pepe Cobo is pleased to present a selection of works by Robert Mapplethorpe in the forthcoming exhibition, “Vanitas”, which opens 13 December.
Born in Long Island, New York, in 1946, Robert Mapplethorpe did not begin his artisticcareer as a photographer. In early collage and painting works, he frequently manipulatedfound photographic images and, later, photographs that he had taken with a Polaroidcamera. His practice was decisively altered when he acquired a large format press camera, which he would use to photograph his friends and acquaintances: artists, musicians, celebrities, porn stars, and S&M practitioners, among others in his circle. The photographs were sometimes shocking, but always technically brilliant, inciting tension between delicate formalism and occasionally difficult subject matter.
The sexual imagery in Robert Mapplethorpe’s work has always received a great deal of attention, to the extent that it sometimes overwhelms and obscures more nuanced analyses. This exhibition provides a wide selection of themes and subjects to facilitate a richer and more complex understanding of his oeuvre. In the photographs selected for “Vanitas” the human body receives the same formal and conceptual treatment as typical pantry fare—a loaf of bread, a corncob, a melon, a pear, a Dionysian bunch of grapes, an eggplant, or a fish—as well as flowers—androgynous calla lilies or an innocent rose. His own glass collection and textured garments that accentuate the human form are photographed with the same aesthetic conviction as sculpture—Actaeon transformed into a deer by the beautiful Artemis and devoured by his own hounds, a gleaming Spartacus, or the dark and lively head of a Satyr.
All of the photographs in the show are included in a catalogue produced especially for the occasion. Vanitas, the baroque sub-genre of still life painting that gives both the exhibition and catalogue their title, illuminates several important themes in Mapplethorpe’s work. Vanitas symbols served as ambiguous yet incisive reminders of the transience of life and, at the same time, the allure of the material world. In condemning those things that he defined as vain, the painter could not help but caress them, as the promise of seduction and temptation was to be found in the warning itself. In the work of this artist, the banal and the admirable, the obscene and the delicate incessantly overlap. In one extreme begins the other and in all of the oppositions that co-exist in his work, there is somehow beauty.
This exhibition was realized in cooperation with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which was founded in 1988 to promote photography at the institutional level and to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection.
“Vanitas”
Galería Pepe Cobo is pleased to present a selection of works by Robert Mapplethorpe in the forthcoming exhibition, “Vanitas”, which opens 13 December.
Born in Long Island, New York, in 1946, Robert Mapplethorpe did not begin his artisticcareer as a photographer. In early collage and painting works, he frequently manipulatedfound photographic images and, later, photographs that he had taken with a Polaroidcamera. His practice was decisively altered when he acquired a large format press camera, which he would use to photograph his friends and acquaintances: artists, musicians, celebrities, porn stars, and S&M practitioners, among others in his circle. The photographs were sometimes shocking, but always technically brilliant, inciting tension between delicate formalism and occasionally difficult subject matter.
The sexual imagery in Robert Mapplethorpe’s work has always received a great deal of attention, to the extent that it sometimes overwhelms and obscures more nuanced analyses. This exhibition provides a wide selection of themes and subjects to facilitate a richer and more complex understanding of his oeuvre. In the photographs selected for “Vanitas” the human body receives the same formal and conceptual treatment as typical pantry fare—a loaf of bread, a corncob, a melon, a pear, a Dionysian bunch of grapes, an eggplant, or a fish—as well as flowers—androgynous calla lilies or an innocent rose. His own glass collection and textured garments that accentuate the human form are photographed with the same aesthetic conviction as sculpture—Actaeon transformed into a deer by the beautiful Artemis and devoured by his own hounds, a gleaming Spartacus, or the dark and lively head of a Satyr.
All of the photographs in the show are included in a catalogue produced especially for the occasion. Vanitas, the baroque sub-genre of still life painting that gives both the exhibition and catalogue their title, illuminates several important themes in Mapplethorpe’s work. Vanitas symbols served as ambiguous yet incisive reminders of the transience of life and, at the same time, the allure of the material world. In condemning those things that he defined as vain, the painter could not help but caress them, as the promise of seduction and temptation was to be found in the warning itself. In the work of this artist, the banal and the admirable, the obscene and the delicate incessantly overlap. In one extreme begins the other and in all of the oppositions that co-exist in his work, there is somehow beauty.
This exhibition was realized in cooperation with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which was founded in 1988 to promote photography at the institutional level and to fund medical research in the fight against AIDS and HIV-related infection.