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PRESS RELEASE

The Pepe Cobo Gallery in collaboration with the Mapplethorpe Foundation presents, for the first time in Lima - Peru, a selection of works by the North American artist  Robert Mapplethorpe , in which the Peruvian public will have the opportunity to learn more about the work of one of the icons of 20th century North American photography. The exhibition will open on April 8th.

Born in Queens, New York, in 1946, Robert Mapplethorpe did not begin his artistic career as a photographer. In early pictorial works he often manipulated photographic images drawn from various sources, and later, photographs taken by himself with his Polaroid camera. The definitive step took place in 1975, when the artist acquired a large format camera and began to photograph his friends and acquaintances, among whom were artists, musicians, celebrities in general, porn stars and members of the S&M community, among others. Some of these photographs were scandalizing in their time, but always brilliant on a technical level, thus causing great tension between their delicate formalism and the difficult subject matter.

The sexual imagery in Robert Mapplethorpe's work has always received a great deal of attention, to the extent that it sometimes overwhelms and obscures a more nuanced analysis of his own work. For that reason this exhibition presents a selection of his work in order to guide the viewer to a richer and more complex perception of the work of his oeuvre.

Thus, in the selected photographs we can observe an aesthetic and conceptual treatment that is applied not only to the human body, but also to still life, flowers and leaves, often treated in an erotic way.