Following its Los Angeles debut, Robert Mapplethorpe will go on an international tour, traveling to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, Canada (August 29, 2016–January 22, 2017), the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and another international venue. The Getty and LACMA will be the exhibition’s sole U.S. venue.
Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946–1989) is among the most influential visual artists of the late twentieth century. The exhibition reexamines the arc of his photographic work from its humble beginnings in the early 1970s to the culture wars of the 1990s, and includes both his most iconic images and his lesser known photographs. It also explores the artist’s body of work through early drawings, collages, sculptures, and Polaroid photography; working materials from his archive; portraits, still lifes, and figure studies; rare color photographs; and seldom-seen video works. Two complementary presentations are designed to highlight different aspects of the artist’s complex oeuvre.
The exhibition is drawn from the landmark joint Getty/LACMA acquisition of the artist’s art and archives in 2011, made possible by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation’s generous gift and a joint purchase by the Getty/LACMA.
Curators of the exhibition are Paul Martineau, associate curator of photographs in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs, and Britt Salvesen, curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints and Drawings Department at LACMA.