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Andres Serrano
Andres Serrano (born August 15, 1950) is an American photographer and artist. His work, often considered transgressive art, includes photos of corpses and uses feces and bodily fluids. His Piss Christ (1987) is an amber-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported to be the artist's own urine. He also created the artwork for the albums Load and Reload by Metallica.
Serrano was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on August 15, 1950 to a Honduran father and an Afro-Cuban mother who was born in Key West but raised in Cuba. His father left New York for Honduras while Serrano was young, and he was mostly raised by his mother, whom he "didn't like" and suffered from schizophrenia. Serrano was raised as a strict Roman Catholic, but left the Church after being confirmed. He dropped out of high school at 15, and attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School on scholarship from 1967 to 1969, where he studied sculpture and painting. After leaving art school, he took up photography for the first time. He then moved to the East Village, where he became a drug addict and dealer for much of the 1970s before quitting at 28.
Serrano began making art again in 1980, when he met his first wife. He worked as an assistant art director at an advertising firm before exhibiting his first work in 1983. Photographer Alex Harsley put Serrano's work in his first New York City show at his Fourth Street Photo Gallery.
His work has been exhibited in diverse locations around the world including the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, World without End (2001), and a retrospective at the Barbican Arts Centre in London, Body and Soul (2001).
His exhibitions have often inspired angry reactions. On October 5, 2007, his group of photographs called The History of Sex were on display and several were vandalized at an art gallery in Lund, Sweden by people who were believed to be part of a neo-Nazi group. On April 16, 2011, after two weeks of protests and a campaign of hate mail and abusive phone calls to an art gallery displaying his work, orchestrated by groups of French Catholic reactionaries, approximately a thousand people marched through the streets of Avignon, to protest outside the gallery. On April 17, 2011, two of his works, Piss Christ and The Church, were vandalized. The gallery director plans to reopen the museum with the damaged works on show "so people can see what barbarians can do".
Serrano usually makes large prints of about 20 by 30 inches (51 by 76 cm). He has shot an array of subject matter including portraits of Klansmen, morgue photos, and pictures of burn victims. He went into the New York City Subway with lights and photographic background paper to portray the bedraggled homeless, as well as producing some rather tender but sometimes decidedly kinky portraits of couples. One of these last shows what Adrian Searle of The Guardian described as "a young couple, she with a strap-on dildo, he with a mildly expectant expression."
Many of Serrano's pictures involve bodily fluids in some way—depicting, for example, blood (sometimes menstrual blood), semen (for example, Blood and Semen II (1990)) or human breast milk. Within this series are a number of works in which objects are submerged in bodily fluids. Among these is Piss Christ (1987), a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's own urine, which caused great controversy when first exhibited. The work was sold for $277,000 in 1999, which was far beyond the estimated $20,000 – $30,000. Serrano, alongside other artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Barbara Degenevieve, and Merry Alpern, became a figure whom Senator Jesse Helms, and Senator Alphonse D'Amato, as well as other cultural conservatives, attacked for producing offensive art while others, including The New York Times, defended him in the name of artistic freedom. (See the American "culture wars" of the 1990s).
Serrano's series Objects of Desire, from the early 1990s, features close-ups of firearms, photographed at the Slidell, Louisiana home of artist Blake Nelson Boyd. Included is a shot, against a glowing orange background, down the barrel of a loaded .45 revolver (belonging to Boyd's grandfather) that was used by Jonas Mekas for the cover of the April–May–June 2007 Anthology Film Archives catalog.
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Andres Serrano
Andres Serrano (born August 15, 1950) is an American photographer and artist. His work, often considered transgressive art, includes photos of corpses and uses feces and bodily fluids. His Piss Christ (1987) is an amber-tinged photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass container of what was purported to be the artist's own urine. He also created the artwork for the albums Load and Reload by Metallica.
Serrano was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on August 15, 1950 to a Honduran father and an Afro-Cuban mother who was born in Key West but raised in Cuba. His father left New York for Honduras while Serrano was young, and he was mostly raised by his mother, whom he "didn't like" and suffered from schizophrenia. Serrano was raised as a strict Roman Catholic, but left the Church after being confirmed. He dropped out of high school at 15, and attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School on scholarship from 1967 to 1969, where he studied sculpture and painting. After leaving art school, he took up photography for the first time. He then moved to the East Village, where he became a drug addict and dealer for much of the 1970s before quitting at 28.
Serrano began making art again in 1980, when he met his first wife. He worked as an assistant art director at an advertising firm before exhibiting his first work in 1983. Photographer Alex Harsley put Serrano's work in his first New York City show at his Fourth Street Photo Gallery.
His work has been exhibited in diverse locations around the world including the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, World without End (2001), and a retrospective at the Barbican Arts Centre in London, Body and Soul (2001).
His exhibitions have often inspired angry reactions. On October 5, 2007, his group of photographs called The History of Sex were on display and several were vandalized at an art gallery in Lund, Sweden by people who were believed to be part of a neo-Nazi group. On April 16, 2011, after two weeks of protests and a campaign of hate mail and abusive phone calls to an art gallery displaying his work, orchestrated by groups of French Catholic reactionaries, approximately a thousand people marched through the streets of Avignon, to protest outside the gallery. On April 17, 2011, two of his works, Piss Christ and The Church, were vandalized. The gallery director plans to reopen the museum with the damaged works on show "so people can see what barbarians can do".
Serrano usually makes large prints of about 20 by 30 inches (51 by 76 cm). He has shot an array of subject matter including portraits of Klansmen, morgue photos, and pictures of burn victims. He went into the New York City Subway with lights and photographic background paper to portray the bedraggled homeless, as well as producing some rather tender but sometimes decidedly kinky portraits of couples. One of these last shows what Adrian Searle of The Guardian described as "a young couple, she with a strap-on dildo, he with a mildly expectant expression."
Many of Serrano's pictures involve bodily fluids in some way—depicting, for example, blood (sometimes menstrual blood), semen (for example, Blood and Semen II (1990)) or human breast milk. Within this series are a number of works in which objects are submerged in bodily fluids. Among these is Piss Christ (1987), a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's own urine, which caused great controversy when first exhibited. The work was sold for $277,000 in 1999, which was far beyond the estimated $20,000 – $30,000. Serrano, alongside other artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Barbara Degenevieve, and Merry Alpern, became a figure whom Senator Jesse Helms, and Senator Alphonse D'Amato, as well as other cultural conservatives, attacked for producing offensive art while others, including The New York Times, defended him in the name of artistic freedom. (See the American "culture wars" of the 1990s).
Serrano's series Objects of Desire, from the early 1990s, features close-ups of firearms, photographed at the Slidell, Louisiana home of artist Blake Nelson Boyd. Included is a shot, against a glowing orange background, down the barrel of a loaded .45 revolver (belonging to Boyd's grandfather) that was used by Jonas Mekas for the cover of the April–May–June 2007 Anthology Film Archives catalog.