Eros and Order is the first retrospective in our country of the North American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (New York, 1946 - Boston, 1989), the most transgressive and visionary artist in contemporary photography. Curated by Anne Tucker, photography curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (United States), the exhibition exhibits a selection of 130 photographs produced between 1975 and 1988, from the Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York, United States.
Included are his famous series of still lifes with flowers, nudes of men and women, homoerotic and sadomasochistic images, portraits of artists and celebrities such as Patti Smith, Arnold Schwarzenegger, William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, Carolina Herrera, Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz and Cindy Sherman, among others, in addition to their famous self-portraits.
Robert Mapplethorpe is considered one of the most controversial photographers of the 20th century. He was born and raised in Long Island (New York) and, after studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he began to work with a Polaroid, portraying his circle of friends and acquaintances: artists, musicians, porn stars and anonymous characters who visited the More underground clubs in New York. At the end of the seventies, he immersed himself in the world of medium format cameras and with them also changed the style of his photographs, accentuating the emphasis on the formal beauty of his compositions.
Along with the exhibition, Malba published a 200-page bilingual catalog (Spanish-English), with an introduction by Eduardo Costantini; a presentation by Michael Stout, President of the Mapplethorpe Foundation; a curatorial essay by Anne Tucker; a complete biographical chronology of the artist and the reproduction of all the works in the exhibition.