Understanding America today?
From 27 April 2024, the Musée Maillol and the Tempora agency are presenting an exhibition of photographs by the artist Andres Serrano to help us better understand an America engaged in an electoral battle that is crucial to its future.
More than a photographer, Andres Serrano can be considered an "artist with a camera", as he defines himself. Through his carefully staged photographs, he reveals an often disturbing reality of America. Religion, death, sex, politics, poverty and violence permeate the work of this American artist. So many facets of an America that is both monumental in its triumphalism and fragile in its contradictions.
A master of the portrait, Serrano magnifies the contemporary individual by drawing on classical culture, particularly ancient painting, in the service of a sacredness now mixed with pop culture. The photographer's gaze has the effectiveness of a revolver pointed at a schizophrenic society of which Donald Trump has become both the symptom and the emblem, and which will occupy a haunting place in the Musée Maillol's exhibition.
Provocative for some, an objective witness to the world for others, Andres Serrano readily highlights the taboos that a puritanical America wants to conceal. Some of his potentially shocking photographs, which have sometimes been vandalised in previous exhibitions, will therefore be presented in a special exhibition at the Musée Maillol.
