On Thursday 1 December, at 18.30 Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia will inaugurate the exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe.
For the first time Milan will host a major retrospective devoted to the work and career of Robert Mapplethorpe, one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century whose perfectly composed images have influenced generations of photographers and artists.
Mapplethorpe's heyday was in New York during the seventies and eighties, the age of the pop revolution, new dada and Andy Warhol; the creative and uninhibited city of sexual liberation, of performance and body art.
Today Mapplethorpe is unanimously hailed as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century because, as only the great know how, he managed to be both classic and modern at the same time: the witness of his own times yet abstract in a sort of perfect timelessness.
Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs are rigorous, composed and meticulously detailed. Bodies and flowers alike are portrayed in almost aseptic environments, their movements are harmonious recalling renaissance studies for painting and sculpture. Perfection for Robert Mapplethorpe, a distant horizon for the majority of artists, was the sine qua non that had to be attained in each and every photograph.

The exhibition, from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation in New York, comprises 178 photographs and is a unique opportunity to view Mapplethorpe's oeuvre in a single retrospective panorama: his early Polaroids dating from the seventies, the celebrated still lifes, the flowers, the portraits, the disconcerting Lisa Lyon series, the splendid images devoted to the male body (an unprecedented study as well as a celebration), the homage to his muse Patti Smith and his unusual, tender and melancholic portraits of children.

“I often have trouble with contemporary art because I find it's not perfect. It doesn't have to be anatomically correct to be perfect either. A Picasso portrait is perfect. It's just not questionable. In the best of my pictures, there's nothing to question – it's just there. And that's what I try to do”.

Both Mapplethorpe's extreme modernity and his great classicism lie in this possible perfection that can be accomplished in the fleeting moment of a shot, of a photo session.
Contrasto has published a catalogue to accompany the exhibition.