Review of Robert Mapplethorpe: Objects at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg

01/10/16

Robert Mapplethorpe: Objects

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg

29 August – 19 November 2016

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89) may be best known for his photographic works and controversial imagery of the underground BDSM scene in the late 60s and early 70s of New York, but he didn’t really begin taking photographs until he borrowed a Polaroid camera in 1971, and then later acquired a Hasselblad medium format of his own. Before this point, he studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, majoring in graphic art (although he dropped out in 1969 without completing his degree). During this time, however, and in the years immediately following, he made a large number of collages and three-dimensional assemblages, compiling everyday objects and found images from (often pornographic) magazines. This small, but enlightening and enriching exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, brings together 12 of these “objects”, rarely ever seen, and recently acquired by the J Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, set up by the artist before his death from HIV/Aids-related complications at the age of 42.

The objects on display show a clear graphic influence, with the triangle – representative of the Trinity and the traditional portrayal of the Holy Family – recurring as a repeated leitmotif throughout. One of six children, Mapplethorpe had a strict Catholic upbringing, which permeates his work, even when its content becomes more explicitly homosexual and contentious.

Read this review here

Portfolio: Jo Spence. BP Spotlight at Tate Britain

14/12/15
Portfolio: Jo Spence

BP Spotlight: Jo Spence
Tate Britain
until autumn 2016

Published in the January 2016 print issue of DIVA magazine

Review of FB55 in the Fox Reading Room, ICA

24/04/15

FB55

Fox Reading Room, ICA

24 March – 17 May 2015

This was supposed to be a small but fascinating celebration of the 60th anniversary of Francis Bacon’s first exhibition at the ICA. Instead, the business of curating the show became for Gregor Muir, the ICA director, a mystery of the disappearing archive. “I had hoped to show installation shots, I had hoped to show photos of Bacon at the ICA, and I had hoped to present a room in which I could show what the exhibition looked like,” he explains, “but that was, in the end, impossible.”

For whatever reason, there is scarcely any documentation of the 1955 exhibition. Muir scoured the ICA archives from the time, now held at Tate, but all he could find was a test print of an invitation card (through sheer luck, he later chanced on an actual card in a nearby bookshop); the press release; a list of works; and one photograph of an ICA employee standing in front of one of the works, hanging in the then Dover Street Market premises.

So why persist in making a show out of, well, virtually nothing?



To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/fb55-francis-bacon-archival-display-review-ica