It is difficult to talk about Mapplethorpe’s work without trivializing the widely explored photography theme of eroticism. There is also the risk of becoming mired in the complex issue of desire, especially when analyzed in the context of hypermodern society, which has transformed people from beings who desire into consumers. Immediate gratification, compulsive satisfaction, and consumption without shortage are factors producing a crisis of desire, about which Mapplethorpe may still have something important to tell us. The exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan brings together over 200 of the American photographer’s most powerful, iconic, and unconventional works. The exhibition includes a series of previously unseen shots and still manages to amaze. “The Forms of Desire” is the second act of a trilogy that began in Venice and will conclude in Rome. It forces viewers to confront the eroticism in the images, which fascinates and disturbs simultaneously. Provocation and aesthetic harmony converge, bringing the question of Eros back to its original meaning of vigorous momentum that transcends the distinctions between good and evil, drive and perversion. Eros is life: the sometimes disjointed and painful, yet always creative, tension that moves us all. It is the vital inspiration inherent in human beings as they attempt to negotiate spaces of coexistence with Thanatos, or death. Since the beginning of his career, Mapplethorpe has tried to reconcile dichotomies, such as order and disorder, consent and dissent, and anarchy and idealism. His gaze has always been turned toward the multifaceted nature of human beings and their physiological instability. His famous quote is: “I am trying to pick up on the madness and give it some order.”

Robert Mapplethorpe, Thomas, 1987 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

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Robert Mapplethorpe Biography: Early Life and Artistic Formation in New York

Mapplethorpe was born in Queens, New York, in 1946, into a large family. The six children were raised with a strict Catholic upbringing. After graduating from high school, he moved to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to pursue a degree in advertising design. However, he soon changed his focus to drawing, painting, and sculpture. In 1967, he met Patti Smith, who would become one of the most important figures in his life. At the time, she was an art major at Glassboro State College in New York. The two decided to move in together and began a deep and formative relationship. Mapplethorpe became one of the interpreters of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, a time when creativity became a political gesture and the arts merged into new languages of freedom and identity. “Everything changed when his friend, the filmmaker Sandy Daley, gave Mapplethorpe a Polaroid camera,” recounts Denis Curti, curator of the exhibition. “Between 1970 and 1971, with that camera in hand, Robert began exploring self-portraiture, focusing on homoerotic imagery and starting with himself. At the same time, he met Tom of Finland (the pseudonym of Touko Laaksonen), the first artist to give visual form to homosexual aesthetics. A deep friendship developed between them that forever transformed Mapplethorpe’s vision. Both explored themes of fetishism, leather and classical beauty applied to the male body. While Tom expressed this through the exaggeration of drawing, Mapplethorpe used photography to convey an almost marble-like precision. Together, they helped turn what had previously been considered purely underground material into art.”

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Photography, Eroticism, and Classical Influence in Mapplethorpe’s Work

At the end of the 1970s, he had the courage to align his art with his lifestyle and sexual behavior, which was undoubtedly scandalous yet poetic. This undoubtedly caused outrage among those who considered homosexuality to be an unassailable taboo. The real scandal probably stemmed more from the fact that Mapplethorpe chose to work with absolute authenticity and testimony rather than representation using photography. This allowed him to escape the symbolic sublimation he could have exploited by choosing painting, for example. Nevertheless, painting was present as a cultural influence in the formal perfectionism of his portraits and flowers, his favorite subjects. He bravely continued to photograph them even knowing his death was imminent; he died of AIDS in Boston in 1989 at the age of 42. Sam Wagstaff, a wealthy collector and art expert, gave Mapplethorpe his first Hasselblad in 1975. The medium-format camera allowed the photographer to achieve the sculptural precision and perfect black-and-white tones for which he is widely known. Mapplethorpe noted that the camera worked well with black subjects because it produced a bronze-like effect. His compositions reflect the classicism of the great masters of the 16th- and 17th-centuries, such as Michelangelo Buonarroti, Antonio Canova, Leonardo da Vinci, and Jacques-Louis David. He borrows their symmetry of glorious bodies and perfect physical, muscular, and epidermal development. His subjects are reminiscent of the ephebes of Greek gymnasia and are captured in ideal poses. For Mapplethorpe, combining sculptures from the past with living models in pursuit of the perfect form meant reflecting art in life and photography. He argued, “I want my work to be seen first as art, then as photography.” His subjects of choice were athletes, bodybuilders, and dancers, all of whom were indiscriminate libidinal targets. In them, the sensuality of everyday life triumphs, as it does in his photographs of flowers and still lifes. In one of his first critical interviews with Gerrit Henry, published in 1982 in The Print Collector's Newsletter, Mapplethorpe said, “My approach to photographing a flower is not very different from my approach to photographing a cock. Basically, it is the same thing. It is a matter of light and composition. There is not much difference. The vision is the same.”

Robert Mapplethorpe, Thomas and Dovanna, 1986 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission​

Robert Mapplethorpe, Papavero, 1988 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

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Robert Mapplethorpe Exhibition at Palazzo Reale Milan: Sections and Highlights

The Milan exhibition is divided into several thematic sections that trace Mapplethorpe’s artistic evolution from his experimental beginnings to full maturity. It opens with rare collages from the late 1960s in which he combines cutouts, objects, and religious symbols to explore identity and the pleasure of artifice as tools for relating to others. A significant portion of the exhibition is dedicated to his muses, Patti Smith and Lisa Lyon. The portraits of Smith reveal an intimate and vulnerable bond, while those of Lyon explore an androgynous beauty that transcends gender codes and celebrates the body according to a neoclassical aesthetic. The self-portrait section reveals Mapplethorpe’s introspective side. Here, photography becomes a mirror of the artist, documenting his transformation from dandy poses in the 1970s to images marked by illness. The portrait section brings together famous figures such as Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and Isabella Rossellini. It presents the studio portrait as a space for encounter and transfiguration. In this space, physicality takes on an almost sacred dimension thanks to the rigorous control of light and composition. The nudes and flower photographs, on the other hand, celebrate formal beauty of classical origin, suspended between aesthetic perfection and erotic tension while challenging social conventions. The exhibition concludes with a dialogue with ancient statuary. Through the lens of his Hasselblad, Mapplethorpe restores vitality to marble forms, transforming stone into a sensitive, almost carnal presence. Creating such a comprehensive exhibition was possible thanks to the Mapplethorpe Foundation’s generous collaboration. Established by the photographer in 1988, a few months before his death, the foundation not only protects his work, but also funds medical research and projects related to fighting the virus and treating HIV.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, 1986 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission​

Robert Mapplethorpe, Collage, Untitled, 1968 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

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The Body in Contemporary Art and the Legacy of Mapplethorpe

Today, the body has experienced a different fate. Although it is exhibited with far greater frequency and ease than before, it no longer has the same disturbing power. As often happens with the most radical instances, the body has been progressively absorbed by the system. Its subversive force has been neutralized, and it has been transformed into a familiar, almost customary device. The nude is now fully integrated into our collective imagination and is no longer a gesture of rupture, but a codified language recognized and socially assimilated. However, reducing Mapplethorpe’s work to provocation alone would be a failure to grasp its deepest core. The heart of his research lies not in scandal, but in reactivating Eros as a vital, generative force. He does not understand Eros in a purely sexual sense, but rather as a primal energy capable of freeing the body from the specters of repression and, at the same time, liberating photography from its purely documentary function. From this perspective, Eros becomes a generative principle of form, a force that opens the subject to life, exposes them to relationships, and enables the creative act. Eros drives the artist to give form to the formless, transform lack into presence, absence into image, and emptiness into existence. Thus, the work emerges as the visible trace of an invisible tension, the concrete manifestation of a vital impulse that passes through the body, transfiguring it and delivering it from contingency to an iconic, timeless dimension.

Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1983 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission​

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Robert Mapplethorpe: The Forms of Desire 

29 January – 17 May 2026 

Palazzo Reale, Piazza del Duomo 12, Milan 

Curated by Denis Curti 

An exhibition by Comune di Milano – Cultura Palazzo Reale

Marsilio Arte 

In collaboration with Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

​On the cover: Self Portrait, 1980 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission

One of the most compelling qualities of contemporary art is its ability to intercept forces moving through reality before they become fully articulated as theory. In the case of Agnieszka Kurant—a Polish artist and one of the most vivid voices in contemporary conceptual research—this sensitivity takes the form of works in which the artist’s intervention is interwoven with collective processes and systemic dynamics that govern our time. Her practice operates precisely on that threshold where human and non-human labor cease to be distinct categories and begin to merge into a fabric that silently sustains much of our social and economic life. It is no coincidence that many of her projects arise from seemingly unlikely forms of collaboration: insect colonies, groups of digital microworkers, scientific modelling, artificial intelligence systems. Kurant does not summon these as mere biological or technological curiosities; she assumes them as co-authors—tiny, almost invisible studio collaborators—acknowledging that contemporary cultural production increasingly depends on distributed intelligence. This is an awareness that Digital Humanities scholarship has highlighted for years, yet in art it takes on a more immediate, concrete form, because the very process of making reveals the hidden architecture of powers that compose the world.

Agnieszka Kurant, Variantology (installation view). Courtesy of Lia Rumma Gallery

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Distributed Labor and Artificial Intelligence

In the sculptural installation A.A.I. (Artificial Artificial Intelligence), this logic emerges with striking clarity. The project’s title alludes to a term coined by Jeff Bezos to describe tasks too complex for algorithms yet easily broken down into micro-assignments and outsourced to networked human workers—a form of labor stripped of context and recognition, codified in the Amazon Mechanical Turk program. Kurant overturns this labor dynamic by entrusting the production of her forms to another kind of “worker”: termite colonies, studied alongside entomologists, that erect complex architectures reminiscent of monumental anthills. The result is not simply a naturalistic quotation—so fashionable in recent years—but a shared system of distributed animal intelligence, in which the construction of form appears fluid, self-organized, and multi-layered: a collective organism rather than the product of a single human intention. In this operation, the artist’s gesture does not deliver an explicit judgement on market dynamics; Kurant instead places human and non-human modes of labor in relation, bringing into focus the way work, in contemporary economies, is produced in series and rendered invisible to most. She never states that these conditions are unjust or morally wrong: she simply reveals a submerged world, one we almost never enter wearing a diving suit. Not an a priori denunciation, but an installation that forces us to see systemic dependence on diffuse, unacknowledged, unnamed productive processes.

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Matter as Archive: Post-Fordite, Sentimentite and Future Fossils

In the cycles Post-Fordite, Sentimentite, and Future Fossils, Kurant treats matter as the concrete outcome of historical, economic, and technological processes.

Agnieszka Kurant, Variantology (installation view). Courtesy of Lia Rumma Gallery.

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With Post-Fordite, she begins from “fordite,” also known as Detroit agate: accumulations of thousands of layers of automotive paint fossilized on assembly lines since the early twentieth century. Kurant recomposes this material into sculptures that resemble both geological and industrial specimens, incorporating more than a century of human labor and mass production.

With Sentimentite, she imagines a future “currency-mineral”: working with data scientists, she transforms data from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts relating to one hundred recent historical events into a series of NFTs redeemable as physical sculptures, produced by pulverizing dozens of objects historically used as currency—from coins to cigarettes, used as barter in prisons. The final form thus condenses collective sentiment, data-analysis algorithms, and the material history of money, becoming a direct comment on digital capitalism and its modes of “ghost capital,” in a research trajectory that, developed over years, brushes against anthropological practice.

Future Fossils pushes this perspective further still, working with fossils of hybrid, mutated organisms—possible future traces of an ecology shaped by the entanglement of technology, economics, and environmental transformation. Across these works, matter functions as an involuntary archive: it incorporates industrial paint, data, emotions, monetary instruments and crystallizes them into forms that evoke geology while in fact speaking of the conditions under which value, imagination, and power are produced today.

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Variantology at Galleria Lia Rumma in Naples

This attention—poised between form and substance—that emerges from complex systems finds a clear counterpart in Kurant’s current presence in Naples, where, since 4 December, the solo exhibition Variantology has been on view at Galleria Lia Rumma—her first presentation in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. On this occasion she presents a selection of new and recent works that trace many of the lines of inquiry she has developed over the years. The title itself, echoing the notion of “variantology” advanced by media theorist Siegfried Zielinski, invites us to suspend any idea of linear development and to read the production of forms as the result of deviations, bifurcations, and possible futures already active in the present. The exhibition brings together works that embody this tension: from projects in which artificial intelligence explores Paleolithic signs, expanding the possibilities of human and non-human communication, to crystallizations that fuse industrial materials and biological dynamics; from speculation on risk landscapes generated by predictive models, to synthetic materials that condense collective economic and affective histories. This is a discourse that does not simply mirror the exhibition—Kurant rarely allows works to “tell” a pre-scripted story—but uses the show as a critical device to raise questions about the co-production of reality by human, non-human, and technological systems.

Agnieszka Kurant, Variantology (installation view). Courtesy of Lia Rumma Gallery.

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All of this unfolds without sacrificing a powerful aesthetic component: the Polish artist’s works appear “beautiful” in the most traditional sense of the word. This is not purely conceptual art that pre-emptively excludes visual impact. From the glazed “meteorites” floating mid-air (Post-Fordite) to vaporwave prints manipulated with encrustations of inorganic chemical elements—zinc, magnesium, potassium (Nonorganic Life)—the works intrigue and seduce, naturally drawing the viewer into the meaning they hold.

In this context, Naples—with its history of sciences, technologies, and cultural contaminations, from alchemical traditions to informal urban laboratories—offers a fertile horizon of sense for a project that investigates the ways forms and meanings are generated through the coexistence of heterogeneous worlds, without a single center of control. The works presented in the city—though different from one another—share a gesture: delegating formal production to entities that escape the artist’s unilateral control. It is as if the work is compelled to carry a question: what forms might the world take if we let it produce itself? A question that speaks as much to the physics of complex systems as to the transformations of our everyday life, increasingly regulated by processes beyond our control, and often beyond our full understanding.

Agnieszka Kurant, Variantology (installation view). Courtesy of Lia Rumma Gallery.

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Art Beyond the Individual Author

What makes Kurant’s position convincing is not her theoretical apparatus—though it is rich and cross-disciplinary—but her capacity to translate highly abstract issues into surprisingly direct forms. Her works do not require, at least on first encounter, technical knowledge of the processes that generate them: it is enough to stand beside them to sense that something has shifted in how we understand authorship, matter, and the artist’s responsibility itself. Precisely at a moment when artificial intelligence seems to have monopolized public debate, Kurant reminds us that cognitive delegation is not new—and that it concerns not only machines, but collectivity, ecosystems, economies, everything that works without being seen: the ghost force that moves the world. No celebration of the “posthuman,” no technological seduction, no dystopian drift; rather, a methodical investigation into the material and immaterial conditions that allow forms to exist and to coexist.

​What happens when the artist renounces occupying the entire space of the work in order to make room for a multitude of agents—human and non-human—who share responsibility for form? It is a question that speaks directly to our time, because it challenges the very idea of the individual in a world built from ever-tighter interdependencies. And perhaps the most precious contribution of her research lies in showing how art can become a place where the visible and the invisible are not opposed but continuous. In Kurant’s work, what appears is never only what is seen: it is the provisional manifestation of a broader process—one that precedes us, contains us, and will outlast us.