200 Eastern Pkwy, Brooklyn, NY 11238, United States
Andres Serrano studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School from 1967 to 1969. On the photo - a Brooklyn Museum.
Career
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2009
Irina Movmyga and Andres Serrano at the 15th annual ARTWALK NY at Skylight Studio on November 17, 2009 in New York City. Photo by Amy Sussman
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2011
Andres Serrano near his new series 'Holy Works'. Photo by Selina Ting.
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2011
Andres Serrano in front of his destroyed Piss Christ. Photo by Le Monde.
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2011
Andres Serrano near his destroyed Piss Christ.
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2012
Irina Movmyga and Andres Serrano attend The As If Magazine Issue #2 Dinner For Audemar Piguet Honoring Francois-Henry Bennahmias at Hotel Americano on November 15, 2012 in New York City. Photo by Donald Bowers
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2012
Irina Movmyga and Andres Serrano attend The As If Magazine Issue #2 Dinner For Audemar Piguet Honoring Francois-Henry Bennahmias at Hotel Americano on November 15, 2012 in New York City. Photo by Donald Bowers
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2012
(Left to right) Andres Serrano and Scott Fishkind at The As If Magazine Issue #2 Dinner For Audemar Piguet Honoring Francois-Henry Bennahmias at Hotel Americano on November 15, 2012 in New York City. Photo by Donald Bowers
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2012
Andres Serrano at the Kansas City Art Institute's 2012 commencement ceremony Photo by Kansas City Art Institute
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2013
(Left to right) International CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels Nicolas Bos, Andres Serrano and a guest at Van Cleef & Arpels on December 10, 2013 in New York City. Photo by Neilson Barnard
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2015
Andres Serrano at Jack Shainman Gallery near one of his works from Torture series.
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2018
(From left to right) Brett Littman, Caroline Baumann, and Andres Serrano were honored with the insignia of the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in a ceremony held at the Cultural Services of the French Embassyo On March 5, 2018.
Gallery of Andres Serrano
2019
Andres Serrano with the rotating sign from the Taj Mahal's EGO Lounge, part of the artist's collection of Donald Trump-related memorabilia at West 14th Street. Photo by Molly Matalon for The New York Times.
Achievements
A photo by Andres Serrano ‘Blood and Semen III’ used as the cover for the album 'Load' of Metallica.
Irina Movmyga and Andres Serrano attend The As If Magazine Issue #2 Dinner For Audemar Piguet Honoring Francois-Henry Bennahmias at Hotel Americano on November 15, 2012 in New York City. Photo by Donald Bowers
Irina Movmyga and Andres Serrano attend The As If Magazine Issue #2 Dinner For Audemar Piguet Honoring Francois-Henry Bennahmias at Hotel Americano on November 15, 2012 in New York City. Photo by Donald Bowers
(Left to right) Andres Serrano and Scott Fishkind at The As If Magazine Issue #2 Dinner For Audemar Piguet Honoring Francois-Henry Bennahmias at Hotel Americano on November 15, 2012 in New York City. Photo by Donald Bowers
(Left to right) International CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels Nicolas Bos, Andres Serrano and a guest at Van Cleef & Arpels on December 10, 2013 in New York City. Photo by Neilson Barnard
(From left to right) Brett Littman, Caroline Baumann, and Andres Serrano were honored with the insignia of the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in a ceremony held at the Cultural Services of the French Embassyo On March 5, 2018.
Andres Serrano with the rotating sign from the Taj Mahal's EGO Lounge, part of the artist's collection of Donald Trump-related memorabilia at West 14th Street. Photo by Molly Matalon for The New York Times.
Irina Movmyga with her husband Andres Serrano at the Sixth Annual Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony Benefit Gala held at the New York Public Library on October 27, 2014. Photo by Michael Loccisano.
Andres Serrano is an American photographer and artist who became popular due to his provocative shots of Christian and other symbols plunged in literal corporeal material. One of his most controversial works is Piss Christ.
He has also produced a portrait series of nomades, Ku Klux Klan members, Catholic clergy personages, and famous personalities, including Donald Trump.
Background
Ethnicity:
Andres Serrano’s father immigrated from Honduras and his mother, although born in Florida, spent her childhood in Cuba adopting Spanish as her native language.
Andres Serrano was born on August 15, 1950, in New York City, New York, United States. He is an only child of Andres Serrano and Eulalia Serrano (maiden name Negual).
Education
Andres Serrano was raised in a strict Roman Catholic tradition in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. According to the artist, he discovered all the mixture of American background and New York City during his childhood.
When Serrano was a little boy, his father left the family and left for Honduras. So, Serrano was looked after by his mother. It had an impact on his emotional state – he often felt alone and suffered from eruptions of psychosis.
Being part and parcel of his childhood, rites of the church had an immense impact on his later aesthetic sense and orientation of his works.
He developed a passion for Renaissance and Baroque painting with its religious iconography during a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York. Again and again, he returned to the Museum to contemplate the paintings. At the age of fifteen, Serrano dropped out of high school with an intention to become an artist. Although he attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School for two years beginning in 1967, he often considered himself an autodidact photographer.
Andres Serrano spent some of his after art school years in the East Village of New York City, a lively but poor residence for many other people of art and a center of drug culture. Led astray by drug addiction, he threw away his dream of becoming an artist and earned his living by selling drugs. Only by the end of the 1970s, Serrano had been freed from addiction and had begun to work as an assistant art director at an advertising company.
While serving in that capacity, Serrano realized that he was more talented in photography than in painting or sculpture. Since then, it became his main art-making medium. His first works, large-scale colored images with an accent on dramatic and provocative figural compositions that evoked the artist’s childish impressions from the depictions of Christ’s Passion, were created within a studio in 1983.
After several group exhibitions in the East Village art spaces, Serrano had his debut solo show at Leonard Perlson Gallery, New York City, in 1985. Experiments with such bodily fluids as blood, urine, milk, and semen resulted in series of provocative works where the photographer used the corporeal material either as an independent piece of art (Milk, Blood, 1986) or as a part of cruciform shapes and statuary reproductions (Blood Cross, 1985). The red-tinged photograph of a crucifix called Piss Christ became the most notorious of such creations. Plunged in a container filled with the artist’s own urine, it caused heated debates while exhibited for the first time at Stux Gallery, New York City, in 1987, and a year later at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The 1990s marked the changing in the character of Andres Serrano’s works. Although the artist moved beyond photographing objects to traditional portraiture, the subjects matters of his shots didn’t lose their challenging and imagery side. Since then, Serrano has created lots of portrait photos depicting homeless people or nomads of New York City (Nomades, Sign of the Times, and Residents of New York series), Klansmen (The Klan series), corpses from Parish morgues (The Morgue series), and burn victims.
Other works by the artist are focused on such topics as Middle America (Native Americans), lay workers of the Catholic church, close-ups of firearms (Objects of Desire series), and human sexuality. To uncover the extensive nature of the latter, Serrano produced A History of Sex series consisting of photos depicting several couples and single humans in sexual poses. The 9/11 attacks in New York City pushed the artist to create a sort of collective image of America. The 2001-2004 America included photos of homeless, boy scouts, Playboy stars, and famous people, such as now-President of the United States Donald J. Trump, a rap singer Snoop Dogg, a director Robert Altman, and other prominent Americans.
In addition to photos, Andres Serrano has tried his hand as a director and even a songwriter. In 1994, he directed the music video for industrial metal group Godflesh’s song ‘Crush My Soul’. During the 2010s, Serrano realized his lifelong musical ambitions taking up the alter ego project ‘Brutus Faust’. The full-length album Vengeance Is Mine containing covers of classic 1960s songs and several original tracks by Serrano’s wife Irina Movmyga as well as the one co-written by Serrano, Thad DeBrock, and an album producer Steve Messina was released in July 2010. A series of videos mostly made of black-and-white footage and several short films accompanied the album.
Nowadays, Andres Serrano has regular exhibitions worldwide, including the major retrospectives of his work in New York City, Barcelona, Rome, Paris, London, Brussels, Oslo, Tokyo, Moscow, and elsewhere. The recent photo projects by Andres Serrano include 2015 Denizens of Brussels, Torture, and 2017 Made in China.
Bello Nock, ‘America’s Best Clown’ Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus
Troy Rowen, Bull Rider
Jill Hardy, Powhatan, Renape Nation
Leroy Neiman, Artist
Abraham Schnitzer
Snoop Dogg
B.B. King
Donald Trump
Robert Altman
Yoko Ono
Walter Fisher, Private First Class-Battle of The Bulge
Anna Nicole Smith
Cycas Rumphii
Floyd Joy Mayweather Jr. Boxer
Chris Sharma, Rock Climber
Yao Ming, Basketball Player
Anne Kessler
Christian Blanc
Éric Ruf
Françoise Gillard
Laurent Stocker
Martine Chevallier
Muriele Mayette
Roger Mollien
Magdalena
Crucifixion
Mother and Child
Sleeping Woman. Finca “La Gloria,” La Moca
The Hat
Chair and Door, Artemisa - Picture of Fidel, Artemisa
Tapestry and Piano, Old Havan
Steps of Light
The Opening
Textile Shop, Old City of Jerusalem
Ali with his camel Bachlol, Wadi Qelt
Dead Sea Tree
Karen Davies
Donald Green
Thomas Malinowsky
Juan
Camelia
Bunker II, Dachau
Sink, Bunker, Buchenwald
Ceiling Light, Dachau
Fool’s Mask IV, Hever Castle, England
Zhang Chaoqun and Ren Yanghui
Wang Yueling
Zhao Mingjin
He Wenming
Bai Shaoqi
Ma Defan
Religion
Andres Serrano considers himself as a Christian. He made his holy communion at the age of eight, and his confirmation at twelve. He compares the mission of his works having a humanity in it with that of the pope – “opening a dialogue with Cuba, the problem of homelessness”.
He insists that the use of his bodily fluids is a try to “personalize religion for myself”.
Views
Andres Serrano says that his art has “the contrast between the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly”. As he thinks, otherwise, it will be the simple “decorative work”.
Quotations:
"Keep your dreams no matter what. [...] There are all kinds of ways of being an artist and there is no right way or wrong way, only your way."
"It's easy to torture people when you have power over them."
"Torture almost seems to be a part of the human condition."
"Freedom of religion and freedom of expression have something in common: they both have the power to polarize people. Everyone has an opinion on these freedoms and those opinions often clash. It's the result of living in a Democracy where the people don't always share the same values or opinions. That's why it's called a Democracy, because you are free to choose."
"That’s what happens when you do work that is emotionally provocative, it polarizes people on both sides of the fence."
"I’ve never called myself a photographer. I studied painting and sculpture and see myself as an artist with a camera. I learned everything I know about art from Marcel Duchamp who taught me that anything, including a photograph, could be a work of art."
"Even though I consider myself a conceptual artist, I am a traditionalist when it comes to photography. I like to use film and shoot straight. No technical gimmicks or special effects. What you see is what I saw when I looked though the camera. If I've dazzled you with lights and colors, it's because I've dazzled you with lights and colors. Ideas are more important than effects. And effects are always better when they're real."
"I see myself as belonging to a tradition of religious art going back to Caravaggio and others. Caravaggio's works are so strong – using a prostitute as the Virgin Mary."
"I distrust anyone with a message. The best artistic intentions are usually cloaked in mysteries and contradictions. It wouldn't be interesting for me if the art were not 'loaded' in some way. I always say my work is open for interpretation and that's why I prefer not to read many of the 'interpretations' out there. Suffice it to say, the work is like a mirror, and it reveals itself in different ways, to different people."
"A lot of times, contemporary art right now is intellectual, and it's cold. It's not political; it's not social. It's art about nothing. My art is about something, and it's not cold, because I'm not a cold person. Quite frankly, I don't understand a lot of art, so it makes sense to me that maybe some people don't understand my work as well."
"I wouldn't get in bed with the devil, but I would certainly take the devil's picture if he let me. An artist doesn't have judgments against things or people."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"You cannot consider the content of Mr. Serrano's work without considering his attitude toward photography. It is the photograph that breaks through convention, that makes the search possible and that enables the artist to sort out what he likes and does not like in religion and art. It is the photograph that becomes the vessel of transformation and revelation. The photograph then becomes an icon that, for Mr. Serrano, replaces the false icons in his work. The photograph is clean and purified, the reliquary or shrine in which he clearly believes that the word about the body can be stored and spread." Michael Brenson, critic, author, and art historian
Interests
Artists
Marcel Duchamp
Connections
Andres Serrano married his first wife, an artist Julie Ault, in December 1980.
In 2012, the photographer announced that his new spouse and partner became a Russian-born artist and designer of accessories for women Irina Movmyga. She represents the IR label.
Andres Serrano: Holy Works
The book is the culmination of Andres Serrano’s vision of Christian iconography, reinterpreted photographically for the present, and his major statement of his religious and artistic belief
2012
Andres Serrano America: And Other Work
This collection reveals three years of work that produced over 100 portraits of cultural diversity in America, as filtered through the critical lens of one of America's most mythologized contemporary artists