(August, 15, NYC, USA)
Andrés Serrano He is an American photographer who has become one of the most notorious through his photographs of corpses, in addition to his controversial work “Piss Christ”, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass with the artist’s own urine.
Serrano, of Honduran and Afro-Cuban roots, was educated as a Catholic. He studied from 1967 to 1969 at the Brooklyn Museum, and lives and works in New York.
His work has been exhibited in places as varied and prestigious as the Cathedral of Saint John in New York, the Barbican Arts Center in London and in the Lambert Avignon Collection.
Serrano’s work as a photographer is usually in the form of enlargements of 0.5 by 0.8 m, produced with conventional photographic techniques (without digital manipulation). It has covered a vast array of themes including portraits of members of the Ku Klux Klan, photos of corpses, and images of burned victims.
Many of Serrano’s photographs contain body fluids, such as blood (sometimes from the menstrual cycle), semen (eg “Blood and Semen II” (1990)), or breast milk. Within this series there are numerous works of objects immersed in these fluids. The most famous of them is Piss Christ “(1987), a plastic crucifix immersed in a glass of urine. This photograph caused great controversy the first time it was exposed, and it was also denounced by two US senators.
Serrano, like other artists like Robert Mapplethorpe, became a figure attacked for producing offensive art, while others defended him in the name of artistic freedom.
The work “Blood and Semen III” was used as the cover for the heavy metal band Metallica’s album Load, while the work “Piss and Blood” was used in ReLoad.Links
Some of his Photos
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