Robert Mapplethorpe: A Season in Hell
Alison Jacques Gallery, 16-18 Berners Street, London W1, until 21 November
Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1985 self-portrait with little devil’s horns is one of the most instantly recognisable self-portraits in modern photography. Short-haired and cherubically handsome, his face turns back to the camera, an inappropriately appealing daemon, complete with a ‘devil-be-damned’ look in his eye. It’s half full of wit, half haunted by an almost childlike vulnerability.
It’s one of three brilliant self-portraits here in this retrospective, A Season in Hell, which takes its title from Mapplethorpe’s photographs of 1986 which he produced for a new translation of Rimbaud’s poem. From 1980 is an image of the artist as a young man (he was 33), good-looking, punky in black leather and sulkily talented. This is hung opposite one of his last self-portraits from 1988.
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