PHOTO:Nobuyoshi Araki-I, Photography
Fascinated by the fundamental and inextricable triangle of sex, life, and death (it is to him we owe the words “I was no sooner out of my mother’s womb than I turned around and photographed her vagina”), Nobuyoshi Araki is tireless as a photographer, obsessed by women, often bound, and flowers, captured in the all the intimacy of their colored folds.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Anton Kern Gallery Archive
The exhibition “I, Photography” at Anton Kern Gallery presents four distinct bodies of work by Nobuyoshi Araki. The exhibition takes its title from a phrase in the opening manifesto of “Sentimental Journey”, a document of the intimate and mundane moments of his honeymoon. In the spirit of that text, the four series of photographs on display are united by the artist’s use of the camera as a tool for reflecting on the complexities of life. The 22 photographs from Araki’s “Lovers Allure” series exemplify his best-known subject, eroticism and the female form. His subjects pose nude in black and white in bedrooms and bathrooms, on tatami mats and in other intimate, domestic spaces. The surfaces of these prints have been painted with eye-popping ribbons of color, a reference to the visceral nature of sexual desire. The series “Erotos”, a name derived from Thanatos, the ancient Greek personification of death and Eros the god of love, further injects the artist into his portrayal of sex and eroticism. Black and white close-up depictions of body parts, often caught in sexual acts, are juxtaposed with still life photographs of fruits and objects that have been rendered in high contrast with every detail of their surfaces unflinchingly captured. If sex marks a central preoccupation for the artist and one side of the life-cycle, death is the other. For Araki, photography is a diary: a record of what happens from day to day and a space where his “self” can be reflected in his subjects. Hung in the main gallery, Araki’s newest series, “Flower Cemetery” serves as the focal point of this exhibition. Still life photographs of flower arrangements are haunted by disused, children’s dolls, toys and plastic figures. Focusing his lens on cut flowers, a source of intense but temporary beauty, the artist reflects on mortality. Populated by ungainly plastic figures in scenes that are both humorous and disquieting, these images can be read as a method of deflected self-portraiture. Whereas “Erotos” and “Flower Cemetery” balance life with death, his photos of the sky offer a moment of reflection and escape. Though seemingly based in landscape, Araki began taking the photos from Northern Sky following the death of his wife. Taken together, these images illustrate the impulse to communicate the full scope of his life’s experience. Obscuring the line between the morbid and the beautiful, Araki celebrates the truth that death is inseparable from life.
Info: Anton Kern Gallery, 16 East 55th Street, New York, Duration: 12/7-31/8/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.antonkerngallery.com
