The classic National Galleries of Ancient Art in Rome open to photographs by the revolutionary and controversial master Robert Mapplethorpe. From 15 March to 30 June 2019, at the headquarters of Corsini Gallery in Rome, the review Robert Mapplethorpe. The sensitive target, Edited by Flaminia Gennari Santori, director of the Barberini Corsini National Galleries, collects forty-five works by the photographer and focuses on some themes dear to the artist, such as the study of still lifes, landscapes, classical statuary and Renaissance composition.
The exhibition follows in intentions the dialogue and the intertwining of past and present started with the exhibition of Picasso's Parade in 2017 and the Eco and Narcissus review in 2018, which has become a distinctive feature of the strategy outlined by the museum's management.
The choice of the curator to have an exhibition on Robert Mapplethorpe is inspired by theartist's interest in collecting: avid collector of historical photographs, a passion he shared with his partner Sam Wagstaff, whose photographic collection – composed largely of portraits, figures and landscapes – constitutes an extraordinary fund of the photography department of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Mapplethorpe's photography has always caused discussion and his artistic research has never been taken for granted: “The exhibition at the Corsini Galleries is a unique event of its kind. The photos have been compared on various occasions to the works of artists of the past – Michelangelo, Hendrick Goltzius, Auguste Rodin – through surprising and revealing dialogues, but this is the first time that they have been exhibited in the context of an eighteenth-century picture gallery”. The exhibition represents an intimate moment to look at photographs of Mapplethorpe from unusual points of view and rediscover the museum's collection in a contemporary light.
The selection of the works and their placement in the Gallery respond to different intentions: to highlight aspects of Mapplethorpe's work that are in harmony with the Corsini Gallery, understood as a space - physical and conceptual - for collecting, to trigger a unprecedented relationship between the visitors, the works and the environments of the Gallery.
“In the eighteenth century the paintings were arranged on the walls according to criteria of symmetry, eurythmy and compositional variety which stimulated the visitor to identify assonances and differences between the works, training their gaze. These are the same principles that have guided Mapplethorpe's lens throughout his career; the grafting of his photographs, black and white magnets into the colored fabric of paintings that cover the walls, is an invitation to explore the Corsini Gallery with the predisposition of an eighteenth-century connoisseur, in search of assonances, symmetries and differences", he writes Flaminia Gennari Santori in a note.
2019 marks the thirtieth anniversary of Robert Mapplethorpe's death and this review, organized in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York, is part of a series of exhibitions dedicated to the artist, including a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York and, in Italy, the one at the Madre Museum in Naples.
