Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce "Pictures, Pictures", a major exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe curated by Catherine Opie.
This exhibition, Mapplethorpe's first full scale gallery show in Los Angeles in many years, inaugurates the gallery's new space on Wilshire Boulevard.
Celebrated and censored, revered and reviled, demonized and deified, Robert Mapplethorpe's work has never been less than controversial. This exhibition of 44 works selected by artist Catherine Opie presents a unique opportunity to see his work through another artist's eyes.
Opie, a Los Angeles artist whose work explores relationships within communities through portraiture and landscape has stated, "I was interested in going beyond the iconic images we know so well, in showing the way Mapplethorpe straddles different worlds and mines the complexities and range of the photographic genre. This exhibition reflects his exploration of sensuality, the body, still life, landscape, and the intimacy between subject and photographer."
Mapplethorpe's photographs exemplify classical ideals of form and proportion. Reminiscent of the work of Edward Weston, with their controlled relationships between light and shadow, balance and asymmetry, beauty and obscenity, Mapplethorpe images clearly presage a more contemporary interest with the body and in a consciousness of self.
Opie's vision of Mapplethorpe takes the viewer on a journey - moving through a virtual narrative of black and white, male and female, still life and landscape, all infused with political, sexual, and racial issues.
Since Mapplethorpe's untimely death in 1989, his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in museums throughout the world, including Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenehim Museum in New York. His work is widely collected, and he is considered one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century.