Press release
Baldwin Gallery is very pleased to present our third show with camera artist Andres Serrano. To All That’s Been Forgotten. Famously, Serrano’s work first entered the popular public consciousness in the late 80s with the politicized condemnation of the inclusion of the work Immersion: Piss Christ in a show nominally funded by the National Endowment of the Arts. Perfunctorily deemed ‘obscene’, and a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity” by Senators Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Alphonse D’Amato (R-N.Y.), the work became instantly symbolic of both right and reason to call for defunding of the NEA.
But, it is just as simple to view Serrano’s work as contextual to the sacristy of the arcane Paschal Mystery; Catholic reconciliation and mankind’s spiritual redemption hinges on the physical humanity manifested by the son of god said to walk among us: a human body and blood, weak, mortal, fallible, and thus uniquely capable to serve as the conduit covenant between the temporal and the divine. Raised in the Catholic church before the Second Vatican Council, Serrano’s universalizing of both human frailty and the capacity for redemption paradoxically seeks to bring the viewer to intimacy with the ‘common’ miracle of transubstantiation (and what author Flannery O’Connor called ‘the sweat and stink of the cross’): an exquisite restoration of mysteium fidei — humbling and ennobling, unknowable and revealed as exquisite beauty, in both doctrine and faith.
Images are available upon request. Please call 970.920.9797 for further information.