Choreography for an Exhibition, the big retrospective exhibition dedicated by the Madre Museum to one of the masters of photography of the 20th century, curated by Laura Valente and Andrea Viliani, offers a new interpretation for the works of the New York photographer, reinterpreted under the light of the dynamic force that springs from the bodies portrayed and of the continuous search for a “perfection in form”.
A program of site-specific performances, commissioned by the Madre museum to famous international choreographers, will reread the main motives of the Mapplethorpe’s works: from the reference to the canons of neoclassical art to the fading borders between sexual genders and identities; from the black-white contrast to the fragility of the border between pain and pleasure; ending on the seductive glamour of New York in the Seventies and the Eighties, mingled, in a game of evocations, to a Naples in constant swing between life and death.
Until now the works of the American photographer had never been placed in a direct confrontation with that obvious performative component that seems to animate them. The Madre Museum thus affirms its vocation as a collector between different creative expressions that come together to rethink and re-formulate experimentally the fruition and nature of a museum.