Andres Serrano | Infamous Beauty

Andres Serrano is an American artist born in 1950 in New York, where he lives until today. The exhibition Infamous Beauty consists of two separate parts, which complement each other and are thematically intertwined. In the exhibition hall, under the title Beauty, a collection of more than sixty works are presented, selected from the artist’s long artistic career. However, Andres Serrano’s work is not presented here in closed chronological cycles, but in a dialogue of recent photographs with earlier works from the series Body Fluids (1986–1990), Immersions (1987–1990), Nomads (1990), Morgue (1992), Objects of Desire (1992), America (2001–2004), Holy Works (2011), Torture (2015), Made in China (2017) and Robots (2022). Comparing more recent works with works more than three decades older yields surprising and powerful connections.

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The comprehensive series Infamous, created in 2019, is presented in the mezzanine. Andres Serrano has been dealing with the themes of racial intolerance and inequality for a long time, for the first time significantly in the early 1990s in his series Nomads and Clan (both from 1990). The apparent picturesqueness and false nostalgia for the “good old days” that some of the photographs exude are sharply confronted with their reverse side. This kind of contrast is one of the essential characteristics of Serrano’s work - even the darkest places are depicted with respect and a longing for beauty.