Robert Mapplethorpe: Le forme del classico. Le Stanze della Fotografia, Venice, Italy, April 10 - November 23, 2025.
Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del desiderio. Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy, 2026.
Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme della bellezza. Museo dell’Ara Pacis, Rome, Italy, May - October 2026.
PRESS RELEASE
Venice, 12 December 2024. Le Stanze della Fotografia in Venice announces their next major exhibition, devoted to a true, and still in many ways controversial, star of international photography: Robert Mapplethorpe (New York, 1946 – Boston, 1989).
Curated by Le Stanze della Fotografia’s artistic director, Denis Curti, the show Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico is organised and promoted by Marsilio Arte and Fondazione Giorgio Cini in collaboration with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York.
The exhibition will be staged in Venice, at the photography centre Le Stanze della Fotografia, on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, from 10 April to 23 November 2025.
Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico has been conceived as the first act of a larger trilogy, part of a path of study and research aimed at deepening and broadly investigating the figure of Mapplethorpe, which includes two other exhibition events in 2026. Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del desiderio will be the second chapter in this wide-ranging examination of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, and will be staged at Palazzo Reale in Milan, displaying a retrospective of his work, with a selection of his most iconic, powerful and daring images, focusing on the more intense and provocative aspects of his artistic output. Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme della bellezza will be held at the Museo dell’Ara Pacis in Rome and will focus on his studies of beauty understood as classical harmony, with detailed comparisons between images and a selection of significant pictures taken in Italy that have not been previously shown.
"The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation is excited to collaborate with Marsilio Arte, Denis Curti, and his colleagues ontheseMapplethorpe exhibitions,which will be beautifully presented at prestigious venues. Denis Curti's thoughtful curation will provide a unique experience for viewers by transforming the basic approach in each venue, highlighting different facets of Mapplethorpe's oeuvre. While there will be some overlap, each installation will employ a different approach to the artist’s works. Venice has not hosted a comprehensive solo Mapplethorpe exhibition since 1992 when Germano Celant's iconic international retrospective was shown at Palazzo Fortuny. We eagerly await Mapplethorpe's return to Venice after 33 years, as well as those versions planned for Rome and Milan", declares Michael Ward Stout, president of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
With over 200 images, some of them on view in Italy for the first time, the retrospective Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico at Le Stanze della Fotografia pays tribute to the great American artist. It continues the groundwork laid down by curator Germano Celant in his exhibition Tra antico e moderno. Un’antologia (Turin, 2005), by reinserting his work in the context of the art and culture of the United States in the mid-20th century.
It is precisely the classical dimension of Mapplethorpe’s photography, strongly underlined in Venice through meticulous comparisons with images of ancient statuary, that renders timeless the bodies he portrays, captured in all their plasticity and beauty: ancient and contemporary representations of an irrepressible and knowing desire, moulded by the geometry of light and transfigured into eternal, almost divine icons, though still very human.
Thus, the exhibition puts the focus back onto Mapplethorpe’s quest for a perfect sinuosity, a sensual and sacred rotundity that can be seen in the photographs of the flawless male and female bodies on display in Venice, as well as in the magnificent images of flowers, revealed in their naked, truly poetic compositions that are at once ambiguous and delicate.
As Denis Curti points out, "Mapplethorpe uses photography to reinterpret and renew the classical aesthetic, accentuating the dialogue between the living body and its ideal in sculpture. The comparison highlights his ability to transpose the perfection and grace of classical sculpture into contemporary photography through an attention to detail and to light, building a bridge between past and present. The statues, with their incomplete sexuality, make us aware of the importance of flesh in the language of seduction. Mapplethorpe unshackles their marble limbs to bring out a sensual beauty that pulsates beneath tons of rigidity, giving them new life".
Presented in the exhibition are his very early collages, ready-mades created towards the end of the 1960s. Many of them never shown before, they were made by combining his original drawings, clippings from gay pornographic magazines, and found objects. These works reflect Mapplethorpe’s search for identity and exploration of his interests, right from the beginning of his career, using the superimposition of elements.
The retrospective comprises many male nudes that celebrate the body in a paean to classical perfection, emphasising its power, sensuality and symmetry through a refined use of light and composition, exploring desire and eroticism and challenging traditional social norms. In similar fashion, in the female nudes shown in Venice, Mapplethorpe plays with forms, folds, and lines, to create an elegant and minimalist aesthetic intended to represent, as the American art historian Arthur C. Danto has put it, "conscious women, of almost regal power".
Many of his portraits are presented at Le Stanze della Fotografia: from the celebrated series devoted to his partner and friend Patti Smith, immortalised in intimate and iconic poses that reveal her androgynous figure and vulnerability, to those of Lisa Lyon, bodybuilder and the artist’s muse, which explore her vigour, strength and femininity, transcending conventions of gender. Mapplethorpe captures her sculpted body, celebrating its power and beauty through classical aesthetic parameters.
Also on display are portraits of Truman Capote, Glenn Close, Richard Gere, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Annie Leibovitz, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Isabella Rossellini, Susan Sarandon, Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol and many others. For Mapplethorpe the photographic portrait was not just an intimate encounter between two personalities, but a sort of visual altar on which the corporeity of the subject is transfigured, made to play a part in a game of desire and possession.
The photographer’s self-portraits can be unsettling, reflecting his exploration of identity as something always fluid and mutable. Through studied poses and provocative symbols, Mapplethorpe presents himself as artist and subject, probing the boundaries between himself and his public image.
On the occasion of the trilogy, a substantial catalogue is published by Marsilio Arte. The volume, which accompanies the three exhibitions, vast body of work and the evolution of Mapplethorpe's language through 257 works.