The Opening Gallery and ERIS ART are pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Andres Serrano. Opening Saturday, April 22 at 42 Walker Street, this will be the artist’s first significant foray into painting. The exhibition celebrates the release of Confessions: a highly distinctive artistic collaboration between Serrano and the acclaimed poet Gabriele Tinti.
Serrano is one of the world’s most renowned artists. His new works mark a departure from the medium with which he is most closely associated, while also exemplifying the imagination and critical intelligence that he has always brought to bear upon it. They originated as oil pastel drawings that Serrano made over black and white photographs of sculptures by Michelangelo, in a process that he likens to automatic writing: “The resulting images are different from the pictures that inspired them,” he writes, “but I hope the spirit of Michelangelo is there.”
Serrano’s Confessions images amount to a formidable engagement not only with an artistic predecessor, but also, like so much of his work, with Christian iconography. Embodying a very particular kind of beauty, they lend a new emotional force to ostensibly familiar artistic depictions of religious narratives.
Serrano’s collaboration with Gabriele Tinti has led to a haunting meditation on religion, violence, and physicality. Tinti, author of the Montale Prize-winning collection Ruins, has produced a sequence of poems that are as remarkable for their lyrical expressiveness as for their forceful compactness. Often disquieting and always uncompromising in their vision of the human capacity to do harm and be harmed, these poems are Tinti’s most impressive body of work to date.
A deluxe, signed, numbered special edition will be available for sale at the exhibition, and the launch event will feature a reading of selected poems from Confessions by the actor Vincent Piazza (Boardwalk Empire, Jersey Boys).
Andres Serrano is an American artist. Renowned for his ambitious and challenging installations, he has won acclaim for series of photographs including America (“the photographs give such vivid presence to their sub- jects that it is hard not to feel genuinely moved”—The New York Times) and Torture (“both a call for justice and a compassionate portrayal of the human plight”— The Guardian).
Gabriele Tinti is an Italian poet and writer. He has worked with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropoli- tan Museum of Art, and the British Museum (among many other institutions), and his poems have been performed by actors including Abel Ferrara, Malcolm McDowell, Robert Davi, Marton Csokas, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Fry, James Cosmo, Michael Imperioli, Franco Nero, Burt Young, Michele Placido, Alessandro Haber, Jamie McShane and Joe Mantegna. In 2018 his ekphras- tic poetry project Ruins was awarded the Premio Mon- tale with a ceremony at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Altemps.
The Opening Gallery was launched as an initiative that supports contemporary art and international artists beyond the confines of the art market, while it fosters cultural engagement and exchanges between the US and the globe. This alternative art ecosystem attempts to go beyond prevalent gallery models and to showcase global underrep- resented artists, and the work of women artists and artists of color. 50% of the proceeds support neurodiversity and charitable causes, and 25% of the proceeds are donated to the non-profit Luv Michael, which is committed to enrich- ing the lives of autistic adults.
ERIS ART is the art branch of independent publisher ERIS PRESS, based in London and New York. The press publish- es art, literature, and nonfiction, with a particular emphasis on politics and philosophy. Recent and forthcoming titles include Maurice Saatchi’s memoir Do Not Resuscitate: The Life and Afterlife of Maurice Saatchi, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s short story collection Book of Water, Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr.’s No Politics but Class Politics, Kenneth Goldsmith’s I Declare a Permanent State of Happiness, and Thomas Schlesser’s biography of the artist Anna-Eva Bergman, Luminous Lives.
