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Robert Mapplethorpe is the event of the year in Serralves

Robert Mapplethorpe is the event of the year in Serralves

We do not know if Robert Mapplethorpe (New York, 1946-1989, Boston) might still scandalize someone, but we know that Robert Mapplethorpe is the great event of the year at the Serralves Museum of Modern Art in Porto. Inaugurated this week, the exhibition of the American photographer known for his sensitivity to controversial themes and the aesthetics of black and white in photography, contemplates twenty years of work and is about the three corners of his work: still life, portraiture, sexuality.

Altogether, there are 179 works, including some of the most iconic, controversial and surprising images of contemporary photography, chosen by the curator of the exhibit and museam  director João Ribas in the archives of the homonymous foundation created by Mapplethorpe in 1988, a year before his death. "Mapplethorpe: Pictures" includes everything from the first collages and polaroids to photographs of flowers, nudes, portraits and sexual images that made Mapplethorpe one of the most remarkable photographers of the 20th century.

Robert Mapplethorpe, who would live five years, from 1967 to 1972, with his great friend Patti Smith (the photograph on the cover of her first album, "Horses", was taken by Mapplethorpe), began by studying painting and sculpture in New York. He was influenced by the art of Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp and by the 19th century photograph of Julia Margaret Cameron, author of whom would become an avid collector.

His first collages and photographs date back to the 60s and were made with a Polaroid, revealing the growing interest in sexuality and the composition that would come to define his work. From 1975 onwards he began to use a manual Hasselblad camera, whose display framed the world in a square. As early as the 1980s, Mapplethorpe began to create portraits, nudes and still lifes, whose balance, order and content redefined photography as an artistic form. And he opens his first studio in Bond Street, number 24, in Manhattan.
In his 42 years of existence, Mapplethorpe treated all its themes with equal attention and precision, from sexual organs or flower arrangements to portraits of friends, lovers, celebrities and collaborators, turning photography into a controlled performance between the artist and his subject.Controversial and classicist, Mapplethorpe's pioneering interest in sex, gender and race is reflected in images of bodies, pleasure and desire, homosexual and non-heteronormative, and in photographs suspended in the tension between the emotional and political intensity of its contents and the clarity of its composition.

 The Robert Mapplethorpe Inc. Foundation, created by him when he was already sick, has the mission to propagate his work, his creative vision and to promote the causes with which he was concerned. Every year this foundation donates millions of dollars to medical research centers to help unravel and combat the HIV virus.


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