PHOTO:Robert Mapplethorpe
The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) lived a life of passion in the New York underground and rock scenes in the ‘70s and ‘80s. That passion also made its way into his art. In an interview given in 1987, just two years before his death, Mapplethorpe explained that photography in the ‘70s was the perfect medium for a fast-paced time. He did not really choose photography, photography chose him. In many ways, Mapplethorpe was a sculptor at heart, a plastic artist driven by the question of the body and its sexuality and obsessed by the search for perfect form.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Archive
Robert Mapplethorpe became one of the most well known American photographers of the 20th century. He began taking photographs in the ‘70s using a Polaroid camera and showed his work for the first time at the Light Gallery, New York, in 1973. In 1976, he purchased a Hasselbald medium-format camera, working primarily in the studio, began producing large-scale still-life, interiors, nudes, portraits and self-portraits. His studio-based work is notable for its great formal precision. Mapplethorpe also photographed his circle of friends and celebrities and he occasionally produced pictures for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. In the late ‘70s, he documented the New York sadomasochistic scene and published the X Portfolio in 1978 (a group of thirteen silver gelatin prints depicting homoerotic and sadomasochistic subjects). In 1988, the inclusion of some of these explicit images in his major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art ignited a fierce public debate in America about censorship and the public funding of the arts. Consisting of more than 250 works, the retrospective exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma at Stockholm, offers a broad overview of the key periods of Mapplethorpe’s career. In their aspiration for perfection, Mapplethorpe’s pictures blend beauty and eroticism with pain, pleasure and death. The themes of the exhibition are: Body Sculpture, Body and Geometry, Still Lifes and Body Details, Chapel & Color Bracket, Mapplethorpe and Women, Portraits, Eros, Polaroids, Still Moving. We select the series: ‘’Mapplethorpe and Women’’ and present you these black & white photos. Poet and musician Patti Smith was Mapplethorpe’s first and last model and muse. Mapplethorpe photographed covers for Smith’s albums and books of poems. Another important model was the body builder Lisa Lyon, who is the subject of Mapplethorpe’s book Lady: Lisa Lyon. Both women could be described as androgynous. Locating himself in the same intermediate space between femininity and masculinity, Mapplethorpe photographed himself in drag.
Info: Robert Mapplethorpe, Curating: Jérôme Neutres, Pirkko Siitari & Marja Sakari, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Mannerheiminaukio 2, Helsinki, Duration:13/3-13/9/15,Days & Hours: Tue: 10:00–17:00, Wed–Fri: 10:00–20:30, Sat: 10:00–18:00, Sun: 10:00–17:00, www.kiasma.fi/en
