ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE

Through his photographs, Robert Mapplethorpe managed to break through sexual, racial, gender and religious prejudices and become a mythological figure in the American homosexual revolution of the 1970s and 80s. As a mainly studio photographer, he was greatly concerned with aesthetics. He was man whose steadfast objective was the quest for emanating beauty or that which could be discovered in animate and inanimate bodies. He controlled his compositions to the millimetre –the proportions, the balance, the focus, the black and white, the shade and light, the body postures, the attitude, the skin textures- everything that had to be in the photograph and everything that had to be left out.

A photographer of classical subjects in search of perfection, a revolutionary in the socio-political context in which he was destined to live, Mapplethorpe, through the way he looked at and interpreted the form and, among other aspects, also for making his body of work into a kind of diary of his own experiences and demands, is one of the great precursors of the artistic photography that dominates the contemporary proposal.

To coincide with the twentieth anniversary of Robert Mapplethorpe’s death on 9 March 1989 in Boston, Es Baluard presents for the first time in the Balearic Islands a wide-ranging retrospective exhibition of 87 photographs from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, created between 1975 and 1989, with a representation of the main themes of the artist’s work – self-portraits, male and female nudes (Lisa Lyon, Ken, Lydia and Tyler, Denis Speight, Derrick Cross & friends), portraits of famous people (Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Patti Smith, Grace Jones) and photographs of flowers (Tulip, Orchid, Irises, Parrot Tulip, Calla  Lily), statues (Ganymede, The Sluggard, Sleeping Cupid.), erotic compositions (Jack Walls, Cock and Devil) and sex scenes (Marty and Verónica).

Location-Hall: Planta 0
Production: Es Baluard Museu d'Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma