Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía has over 40 David Wojnarowicz photographs in its collection, including several posthumous prints from the “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” series, photographed from 1978 to 1979.

Museum curator Salvador Nadales writes: “Arthur Rimbaud in New York … is the articulation of a testimony to urban, social and political change in New York.

“Wojnarowicz, using the figure of the accursed poet as the only way for an artist to intervene in reality, chronicles his own life and his emotional relationship with New York City in the late 1970s. The artist portrays a number of friends with a life-size mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, thereby taking on his identity and highlighting the parallels in their lives: the violence suffered in their youths, the feeling of being denied freedom, the desire to live far away from the bourgeois environment and the fact of their homosexuality. Wojnarowicz is juxtaposing the historical time of the symbolist poet with the artist’s present. 

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Santa Isabel 52
28012 Madrid (Spain)

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