Extend your visit:
Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico

Start your visit here: for each section of the exhibition, you’ll find exclusive insights from Denis Curti, curator and artistic director of Le Stanze della Fotografia. Discover more about Robert Mapplethorpe’s life as we build bridges between the digital and the physical experience together.

Exhibition sections told by the curator

Bodies made of flesh and marble, flowers, collages, portraits, and self-portraits: Mapplethorpe’s life was anything but linear, and his photographs make that unmistakably clear.

Collage

Drawings, religious fetishes, garments, and textured materials: collage was at the heart of Mapplethorpe’s early artistic output.

Patti Smith

Lover, friend, mother, sister, and confidante: Patti Smith was all this and more to Robert Mapplethorpe, who captured her in all her many facets.

Lisa Lyon

Lisa Lyon’s neoclassical physique intersects with her beauty and femininity. One thing’s for sure: Mapplethorpe never played by the rules of mainstream representation.

Self-Portraits

What better way to convey your worldview than through a self-portrait? Mapplethorpe portrays himself as a dandy, a terrorist, a devil culminating in haunting images that lay bare his face marked by AIDS.

Portraits

With obsessive attention to composition and aesthetic balance, Mapplethorpe worked like a classical artist, but his focus was on the divine within the human.

Male nudes

These male nudes are living sculptures: can we truly see the other when we believe no one is watching?

Female nudes

There is no sexual gaze in Mapplethorpe’s lens. That’s why his female nudes are presented with clarity and strength. Here, women’s bodies are first a source of pleasure for themselves, only then for the viewer.

Flowers

Flowers are living beings, just like people. Through Mapplethorpe’s lens, petals, stems, and pistils seem to transform into pulsing, muscular forms.

Statues and nudes

Though carved in marble, the statues Mapplethorpe photographs convey the vulnerability of flesh through the interplay of light and shadow, casting a spark of life into the eyes of these masterpieces.

Voices on Mapplethorpe: interviews and dialogues

Denis Curti interviews Dimitri Levas

Denis Curti, curator of the exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del classico and Dimitri Levas, Vice President of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and a direct witness to the artist’s life and work, engage in a conversation about who Robert Mapplethorpe truly was.

What relationships, what atmospheres, what inner tensions animated his studio? How did he manage to blend classical aesthetics with experimentation, delicacy with strength? Through personal memories and profound reflections, this video offers an intimate glimpse into Mapplethorpe’s creative universe—a visionary artist capable of transforming the body, light, and form into pure aesthetic acts.

Discover the catalogue

Discover the unique experience of the exhibition catalogue published by Marsilio Arte, an exclusive invitation to explore the evolution of Mapplethorpe’s visual language through 257 works.

Start your journey here: this volume brings together the artist’s most iconic images, where timeless, classical sculptures meet powerful portraits of male and female models, to create a striking visual dialogue between sculptural and photographic representation.

Discover the catalogue

The life of Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe’s story is both captivating and heartbreaking, honest and vulnerable, transparent and incredibly ambiguous. So ambiguous, in fact, that it’s easy to mistake it for the plot of a film. But it’s all true, and his life closely mirrors his photographs. That’s precisely why his images continue to mesmerize, tirelessly and endlessly.

Discover more
Biography

«I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I've never seen before»

Robert Mapplethorpe

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