For over three decades, Andres Serrano has pushed the boundaries of what has been accepted in the medium of photography. His works have both shocked and seduced with confrontational imagery targeting race relations, community values, religious sects, corporeality, sexuality and political order.
Compositions resembling pre-17th century religious paintings challenge the viewer with a perspective of a cultural history of our own design, in all its radiant beauty and stark repulsiveness. Serrano entwines the mortal with the spiritual, the holy with the diabolical and the pure with the sullied, allowing the messiness of carnal existence to spill over onto sacred subject matter. By combining paradigmatic symbols that have historically been ritually separated, his photographs violate taboos, while imparting a profound, visceral dissonance that resonates on a subterranean frequency.
Andres Serrano’s name, along with Robert Mapplethorpe’s, was at the crossroads of the 1989 Culture Wars when Serrano’s photograph, Piss Christ (1987), became the subject of a national debate on freedom of artistic expression and the public funding of controversial art. Piss Christ, an ethereal image of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, remains his most controversial and misunderstood work.
Included in this exhibition are selected photographs from various series including America (2001-2004), a panorama of American society, The Morgue (1992), an investigation of death, History of Sex (1995-1996), graphic images which have been taped to repair previous vandalism, and Torture (2015), his most recent work. Serrano has also photographed numerous other subjects including the Ku Klux Klan, the homeless, and bodily fluids.
Andres Serrano, Selected Works 1984-2015
Since January 7, 2017
25 Broad St
Kinderhook, NY 12106
USA
