Joel-Peter Witkin

06 june 1995 - 17 september 1995

Curated by Germano Celant

The photographs of the American artist Joel-Peter Witkin (Brooklyn, New York, 1939) seem to move within the universe of the perverse and sacrilege, touching upon everything that is taboo and prohibited. They constitute an extreme act, a visual catastrophe that celebrates the astonishing and sublime sacredness of the body of dwarfs cripples, androgynes and hermaphrodites, subjects that historically have been considered undepictable.

The exhibition includes a broad selection of Witkin’s photographic images, all created through a complex series of manual stages before arriving at the definitive print, which in some cases is retouched with pictorial interventions.

All Witkin’s works promote a revision of the themes and images of the bodies that make up western mythology, at the same time reinterpreting masterpieces of the European artistic tradition. Within classic iconography, including that of religious subjects, the artist inscribes a desecrating and provocative charge, thus expressing dismay and wonder in the face of the sublime and the monstrous.

[L.F.]