Moran Bondaroff is pleased to announceRobert Mapplethorpe: Dark and Light, the gallery’s second exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work, curated by Vince Aletti. Comprised of approximately 40 gelatin silver prints, ranging from portraiture to still-life, this exhibition compliments the comprehensive and historic retrospectives currently on view at LACMA and the Getty Museum, who jointly own the most complete collection of Mapplethorpe’s work.
Robert Mapplethorpe is one of the most widely recognized American photographers of the 20th century, known best for his stylized images, including portraiture, nudes, and still life. After studying drawing, painting, and sculpture at Pratt Institute in the mid-60s, he began experimenting with various materials and assemblage, later incorporating Polaroid prints into his collages. During the 70s, Mapplethorpe became primarily focused on photography, using a medium-format camera, increasingly interested in documenting New York’s subculture scene, as well as the friends, artists, musicians, and various people he was acquainted with. Throughout the early and mid-80s, he produced a wide collection of images that simultaneously challenged and exemplified classical aesthetics, while introducing different techniques and formats, including large Polaroids, photogravure, Cibachrome, platinum, and dye transfer prints.
Invited to organize an exhibition from the holdings of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, I jumped at the opportunity to see photographs I’d never seen before and to build a show around them. By far the largest group of unfamiliar images was of black men–a subject Mapplethorpe made his prime focus early on and returned to throughout his career–and those pictures constitute the bulk of the show. One of the great photographers of the male body, Mapplethorpe understood and appreciated it from all angles, in images whose approach ranged from classical restraint to sensual abandon. Because some of his most arresting pictures of men are portraits, the show is also full of beautiful, imposing heads, both sculptural and fiercely alive. So, given my taste and his, the selection is predominately male, but not exclusively, and it’s the other pictures that help define Mapplethorpe’s hungry and brilliantly idiosyncratic eye: a vase of flowering branches in the dappled sun, Fran Lebowitz with a half-finished cigarette, a fish on a bed of newsprint, a magnificently pregnant belly.– Vince Aletti
