Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe, born in New York in 1946 and died in Boston in 1989, was an acclaimed photographer, most noted for his black and white portraits of celebrities, flowers, as well as female and male nudes. While initially creating collages using found photographs, objects, and paintings, Mapplethorpe turned to photography in the early 1970s. Using a Polaroid SX-70 camera, he quickly became known for the portraits he took of his wide circle of friends, including famous artists, musicians, porn stars, and socialites. Mapplethorpe’s diverse oeuvre—homoerotic images, floral still-life photographs, pictures of children, commissioned portraits, and mixed-media sculpture—is united by the consistency of his approach and technique. Mapplethorpe’s photographs offer a seemingly endless gradation of blacks and whites, shadow and light. Regardless of their specific subject, his images combine both provocation and elegance.

Robert Mapplethorpe graduated from the Pratt Institute Brooklyn with a BFA in 1970. He participated in Documenta in 1977 and 1982. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions worldwide, including Saint Laurent Rive Droite (2022), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2019; 2005), LACMA and J. Paul Getty Museum (2016), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (2016), Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (2015), Tate Modern (2008; 2014), Grand Palais (2014), Modern Art Oxford (2009), Whitney Museum of American Art (2008), MoMA P.S.1 (2006; 2008), the National Museum, Stockholm (2007), Museo Reina Sofía (2006), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2004), FRAC, Paris (2003). His XYZ Portfolios were exhibited at Galerie Thomas Schulte in 2020. His work can be found in numerous public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Australian National Gallery, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts,  the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, the International Center of Photography, New York, the Israel Museum, the Madison Art Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Shortly before his untimely death, Mapplethorpe established The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, dedicated to the promotion of photography at the institutional level and to funding medical research in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

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