Andres Serrano: America
dal 9/12/2003 al 17/1/2004
Segnalato da
9/12/2003
Andres Serrano: America
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
The exhibition will include a selection of fifteen to twenty large color photographs from America, an ongoing series of portraits begun in late 2001. All-inclusive in its intent, the series shatters limitations of age, class, ethnicity and professional occupation that have traditionally governed portraiture.
The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of
recent work by Andres Serrano. The exhibition will include a selection of fifteen to twenty large color photographs from America, an ongoing series of portraits begun in late 2001. A book of the
entire series, to comprise some hundred photographs, is forthcoming.
A marked departure from The Interpretation of Dreams, shown at the gallery
in 2001, Andres Serrano's new work harkens back to the grand tradition of
studio portraiture, offering imposing, sumptuously lit portraits of a broad
spectrum of Americans. All-inclusive in its intent, the series shatters
limitations of age, class, ethnicity and professional occupation that have
traditionally governed portraiture. In it, subjects as varied as J.B.,
Pimp; Gisela Glaser, Holocaust Survivor: Auschwitz 1944; Jewel-Joy Stevens,
America's Little Yankee Miss; or Firefighter John L. Thomasian, come
together to offer a fresh look at ''We, the people'', at a time when American
identity and values are the subject of intense political debate, both here
and abroad.
Beyond its implications for an updated definition of American identity, the
series also highlights the discrepancies between public and private,
professional and personal, appearance and essence, which inhabit all of us.
While some of the sitters put forth their public persona with a certain
degree of pride or self-confidence, others seem to use it as a shield,
protecting their inner selves. Others, still, appear to have broken through
any socially imposed layer, to reveal their bare humanity.
Andres Serrano was born in New York in 1950. He studied at the Brooklyn
Museum and Art School and started exhibiting in the 1980s. In 1989, Piss
Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, launched a national
debate about free expression and federal funding of the arts.
Andres
Serrano's art has investigated the nature of contemporary spirituality in
many provocative ways, from images of religious icons bathed in bodily
fluids to portraits of clergy and church interiors, to the Morgue (1992) a
chilling series of images of corpses taken in a city morgue. Portraiture
has always been part of his practice: past series of portraits have included
Klansmen (1990), Nomads (1990), American Indians (1995), and Bodybuilders
(1998).
Serrano's work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions,
nationally and internationally, including the Musée d'Art Contemporain,
Montréal (1992); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1994); the
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1995); the Malmö Konsthall (1996);
the Groningen Museum of Art (1997); and the Barbican Art Centre, London
(2001).
Some works from America were shown at the Firenze Mostre, Florence, Italy,
in the summer of 2003.
Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st Street New York