Biography

Robert Mapplethorpe
(1946-1989)

Robert Mapplethorpe was born in 1946 in Floral Park, Queens. He studied at the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn. During the early 1970s he began experimenting with Polaroid photography and collage. Over the years Mapplethorpe moved on to different formats and turned to modern photography as an inspiration. At the time, homosexuality and gay subculture became strong component of Mapplethorpe’s work and he became well known for highly technical and formal images of nudes, still lifes and portraits that depicted intensely controversial subject matter. Even though he was diagnosed with AIDS in the late 1980s, he passionately continued with his photographic work. One year before his death in 1989, the Whitney Museum of American Art held his first major American museum retrospective.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been held in institutions such as the Solo Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence in 2010, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Malaga in Spain in 2009 and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2008. His works have also been included in exhibitions in major institutions such as the Group Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery in England. Robert Mapplethorpe’s work has been featured in multiple publications. Before his death in 1989, he established the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to promote photography and museums that exhibit it, and to fund medical research in the fight against HIV and AIDS.