Weinstein Gallery is pleased to announce a major exhibition of photographs of women by Robert Mapplethorpe. It is nearly impossible to overestimate the impact of Robert Mapplethorpe's work, both artistically and socially. He is unquestionably considered one of the most important photographers of the 20th century and his work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and books. His photographs are exhibited and collected worldwide.
This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to view a wide range of black and white photographs of women that Mapplethorpe took between the late 1970's and 1980's. Fashion models, actresses, and artists, including Grace Jones, Lynn Davis, Alice Neel, Kathleen Turner, Isabella Rossellini, and Deb Harry, projected their idea of self before Mapplethorpe and his lens.
Novelist Joan Didion wrote about Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of women:
"Of the women who appear [in Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs] most are well known, figures of considerable celebrity or fashion or achievement. There are models and there are actresses. There are singers, dancers, choreographers; makers of art and dealers in art. Most are New York women, with the familiar New York edge. Most are conventionally "pretty," even "beautiful," or rendered so not only by the artifices of light and makeup but by the way they present themselves to the camera: they are professional women, performers before the camera. They are women who know how to make their way in the world. They are women who know a lot of things, and what they know does not, on the evidence, encourage certainty. Some meet the camera here with closed eyes, as in a carnal swoon, or Victorian faint. Others confront it so directly as to seem startled into a fleeting madness; these would seem to be inhabitants of a world in which survival depends on the ability to seduce, beguile, conspire, deceive. Sing for your supper, something in these photographs tells us, and you'll get breakfast."
