Holden Luntz Gallery - 17.05.2022

Robert Mapplethorpe: Maybelle

Robert Mapplethorpe remains as one of the best remembered photographers of the 20th century, most noted for his black and white portraits of celebrities, flowers, male and female nudes. Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Queens, New York, and grew up in a conservative Catholic household. He attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts, concentrating painting and sculpture. Initially creating collages from photographs, paintings and found objects, it was in the early 1970’s that he adopted photography as his primary choice of medium. Using a Polaroid SX-70 camera, Mapplethorpe quickly became popular in the New York art scene photographing portraits of his friends, including artists, musicians, porn stars and socialites. Although his photographic work ranged in themes, his formalist approach to photography allowed him to depict subjects primarily through a refined understanding of beauty and symmetry. Listing Michelangelo as a main influence in his work, Mapplethorpe was considered a formalist for his sculptural use of photography.