Reserve

This major comprehensive anthology is curated by Germano Celant and features about 300 works, some of which have never been shown before

Determined to celebrate the beauty of each subject, Robert Mapplethorpe broadened his photographic language to encompass aspects removed from culture, producing images that created scandal and controversy, yet were also magical and sublime. He created still lifes of blossoming flowers arranged in exquisite vases, and documented the sensual transformations of the first female bodybuilder. His works captured New York’s sexual underground and its perverse rituals, and exalted the monumentality of black bodies, the glamour of the art scene, and the seductive poses of showbiz celebrities and the glitterati. His was a passion for a carnal vision of the world, which looked towards balance and symmetry to discover a classic approach to erotic and existential issues, ultimately constructing photographic images that become paintings and sculptures.

Between 1972 and 1989, the year he died of AIDS, he shot most of his photographs in the studio, in order to recreate the absolute austerity and formal control plied by traditional portraitists and painters. And yet this minimalist approach produced the most lavish, seductive, memorable and astonishing representations and portraits in the history of modern photography.
The variety of the figures he portrayed – almost always people he knew or loved, from Patti Smith to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lisa Lyon and Andy Warhol – testifies to his first-hand knowledge of social, homosexual, literary and musical circles. The result is an extraordinary compendium of American culture from 1970 to 1990, which Mapplethorpe viewed through his portraits of the habitués of art galleries, museums, clubs and bars, posing as dandy and aristocrat, male and female figure, and unafraid of entwining his own life with the world of fetish rituals.

This major comprehensive anthology – the largest ever on Mapplethorpe – is curated by Germano Celant and features about 300 works, some of which have never been shown before. It offers iconographic and historical insight into Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre to discover its roots and its relationship with both ancient art and modern photography.

The exhibition juxtaposes the artist’s earliest Polaroids with Warhol’s paintings and Muybridge’s sequences, and it parallels his male and female nudes with Canova’s Neoclassical sculptures. It also evokes Mapplethorpe’s interest in the history of photography, from Nadar to Ray, and Muybridge to Platt Lynes, and his fascination with art history and masters such as Michelangelo, Bronzino, Schiele and Rodin, whose works are reflected in the photographer’s torsos, portraits and flowers. In essence, it is a critical re-examination of Mapplethorpe, probing his role as an unconventional artist with a unique formalist and classical bent. It is an attempt to produce an uncommon exhibition in which the ties between contemporariness and history help illuminate these respective languages, offering a tangible interpretation of their mirror-like symmetry.

The exhibition, set up in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation of New York, will include extensive reference material, such as the films of Pasolini, Schlesinger, Silverstein, Cavani and Jarman, as well as catalogues and television documentation on the artist. This extensive and complex anthology will also be accompanied by an important volume published by ArtificioSkira, with contributions by Germano Celant, Claudio Strinati and Robert Rosenblum.
The exhibition is promoted by the City of Turin, the Piedmont Region, the Turin Museum Foundation and ArtificioSkira.

Turin, Palazzo della Promotrice delle Belle Arti
Oct 8 2005 – Jan 1 2006

www.mapplethorpetorino.it