With a practice steeped in controversy, Robert Mapplethorpe’s work is crisp, often confronting, and occasionally revelatory. Organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and J. Paul Getty Museum, in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium presents a selection of photographs from still lifes to portraits and figure studies. Getty Museum curator, Paul Martineau, remarks that the exhibition aims to represent the artist’s career with a new approach. “The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s early works, as well as a full array of the gelatin silver, platinum, or dye transfer prints for which he is best-known,” he says.
“Mapplethorpe understood the importance of keeping the public interested in him and styled himself in different guises over the course of his career”, he says. These personas ranged from the hyper masculine and the overtly effeminate, to representations of the devil. His involvement in the gay scene and BDSM culture in New York resulted in some of the most powerful and evocative images, exposing a world rarely spoken about.
The work of Mapplethorpe is unique, as Getty Museum curator Britt Salvesen explains, “A Mapplethorpe print can never be mistaken for the work of any other artist.” He maintains, “On another level, at a distance of 30 years, we can fully appreciate Mapplethorpe’s significance as an artist who made a case for photography’s validity in the contemporary art world, and who refused to draw a line between his art and his life.”
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium
Art Gallery of New South Wales
28 October – 4 March
Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
Stepping into Sarah Contos’s sprawling home studio in Kyle Bay, in southern Sydney, feels like a step inside the artist’s inventive and inquisitive brain—apt given that Contos’s upcoming show at UNSW Galleries, Eye Lash Horizon, explores aspects of what makes us human.
Helen Mueller has been printmaking for 25 years, but moving to Hobart four years ago shifted her focus to the local natural environment. Now her delicate prints, made with materials foraged from the forest floor, are showing at Handmark Gallery.
Emma Phillips has a knack for catching moments of unbridled humanity. In her latest exhibition at ReadingRoom, she shines a light on the breadth of her practice, amalgamating several projects from the last decade.
