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
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country, curated by Jonathan Jones and now showing at Bundanon, highlights a long history of Indigenous art on the New South Wales south coast, with works and installations from Jones, Aunty Julie Freeman, Aunty Cheryl Davison, and Mickey of Ulladulla.
Heide Museum of Modern Art’s summer blockbuster exhibition is unveiling the breadth and beauty of Italian modernism through design. With over 170 objects spanning sixty years, Molto Bello explores the cultural impact of this period of creativity and invention.
In an expansive show at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, seven leading Australian ceramic artists have reinvigorated one of Australia’s oldest museum collections by creating a contemporary potter’s quarter—known as the ‘kerameikos’ in Ancient Greece.
