Andres Serrano was born in New York (USA) in 1950. He lives and works in New York.
Graduated from the Brooklyn Museum Art School of New York (USA) in 1969, Andres Serrano is one of the most recognized contemporary artist on the international art scene.
He enjoyed several major solo shows such as Andres Serrano - Retrospective at the Moscow House of Photography (Russia, 2005), Dark Places at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (USA, 2006), Beautiful Suffering - Photography and the Traffic in Pain at the Williams College Museum of Art (USA, 2006), En Las Fronteras at the Villa Croce Museo d'Arte Contemporanea in Genoa (Italy, 2006), A History of Sex at the Kulturen of Lund (Sweden, 2007), Andres Serrano at the Palais Fesch - Musée des Beaux-Arts in Ajaccio (Corsica, 2014), Ainsi soit-il at the Château de Villeneuve, Fondation Emile Hugues in Vence (France, 2015), Redemption at the Fotografiska Museum of Stockholm (Sweden, 2015), Andres Serrano at the Void Derry of Londonderry (Ireland, 2016), Torture at the Collection Lambert, Avignon (France, 2016), Ainsi soit-il at the Collection Lambert en Avignon (France, 2016), Uncensored photographs at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels (2016), Andres Serrano at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (France, 2016), Andres Serrano at the Petit Palais in Paris (France, 2017), Andres Serrano - Revealing Reality at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam (The Netherlands, 2017), Andres Serrano: An American Perspective at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing (China, 2017), Torture at the Stills Gallery in Edinburgh (United Kingdom, 2018), The Game - All Things Trump at ArtX in New York (USA, 2019), Infamous, at the NeueHouse, Los Angeles and at Fotograsfiska, New York (USA, 2020), Torture by Andres Serrano - An A/political Project, Municipal Theatre of Pireaus, Athens (Greece, 2021), and Infamous at Fotografiska Stockholm (Sweden, 2022).
He also took part in several significant group shows among which Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography at the Tate Modern of London (United Kingdom, 2008), Traces du Sacré at the Pompidou Center of Paris (France, 2008), Autour de l'extrême at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (France, 2010), Unsettled: Photography and Politics in Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA, 2011), NYC 1993 at the New Museum of New York (USA, 2013), Le Mur at La Maison Rouge in Paris (France, 2014), Slip of the tongue, at the Punta della Dogana, Pinault Foundation in Venice (Italy, 2016), Perfect Likeness : Photography and composition at the Hammer Museum of Los Angeles (USA, 2016), Joie de vivre at the Palais des Beaux Arts of Lille (France, 2016), Nothing but blue skies at the Rencontres de la photographie in Arles, (France, 2016), Love Stories during the PHOTAUMNALES 2016 in Beauvais (France, 2016), An incomplete history of protest at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (USA, 2018), Show your wound at the Dom Museum in Vienna (Austria, 2018) and Incarnations - African Art as Philosophy at the Centre for Fine Arts - BOZAR in Brussels (Belgium, 2019).
Andres Serrano's work is present in many private and public collections such as the MOMA in New York (USA), Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (France), Huis Marseille in Amsterdam (Holland), National Gallery of Australia in Canberra (Australia), the Vancouver Art Gallery (Canada), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Zagreb (Croatia), the ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst in Copenhagen (Denmark), the CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux (France), the Collection Lambert en Avignon (France), the Institute of Contemporary Art in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), the Israel Museum of Jerusalem (Israel), the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo of Mexico City (Mexico), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, (USA), the Brooklyn Museum (USA), the Institute of Contemporary Art of Boston (USA), the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth (USA), the New Museum of Contemporary Art of New York (USA), the Groninger Museum (The Netherlands), the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington (USA).
Andres Serrano has been represented by la Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels, since 2012.
For more than 30 years, the New York based artist Andres Serrano (b. 1950) addresses fundamental social and ethical issues on the fringe of American society. He captures the Zeitgeist of the margins of our western community where we all take part in as actors, witnesses and victims. Previous series like Residents of New York (2014), America (2002), The Klan (1990), Nomads (1990), Bodily Fluids (1990) and The Immersions (1987-1990) mirror Serrano's need to unravel the hidden or unspoken truth of today's morals and customs.
Following the global fame brought to Andres Serrano by his art-piece Piss Christ (1987), the artist continues to direct his audiences' thoughts toward man's standard of value judgment. The topics raised, to which all people are closely related, are within the realms of universal value. Quoting from the classic aesthetics, and through the structuring, shadowing, colouring and even through the use of external interferences, Andres Serrano moulded the subjects in his photographic images into something sculptural and monumental. The artist believes that the restricted use of media, to a certain extent, will allow for more profound expressions of one's artistic concepts. It is for this reason, the artist focuses in the use of photography as his medium for artistic expression.
Though widely considered to be self-taught, Andres Serrano claims to have been mentored by Duchamp. The selection of his subjects are both wide-ranged and unusual: still objects, religious images, human, human excrements, bodily liquids, and even corpses. His selection of elements and subjects that incite the audience's emotions are an addressing of conventional subject matters, as well as an addressing of marginalized and taboo subject matters. He intends to question everything about the contemporary divide between what's acceptable and what's not.
Due to the method of creation and materials used, his photographic artworks were considered a re-presentation of the authentic. Authenticity is another subject matter for Andres Serrano, authenticity here means something different to the commonly accepted authenticity. The artist does not, upon the different social statuses of his subject matters, judge nor treat differently the way in which the artworks are presented. The taboo topics of Western society are unreservedly exhibited through his lens. Such acts of rebellion are a challenge to the boundaries of universal culture, and such artworks are a questioning of authenticity and legitimacy.