Robert Mapplethorpe’s name is synonymous with boundary-breaking themes. His highly subversive portraits took the art world by storm in the eighties, addressing taboo issues of love, sex, the body, and homosexuality in a time when the AIDS epidemic swept across the globe, changing it forever. Over three decades later, Mapplethorpe’s photographs have proven as timeless as they were the day he snapped the shutter; still holding up a mirror to current issues of sex and gender in a political climate once again rife with changing conceptions of meaning, appearance, and acceptance.

Olga Korper Gallery’s seventh solo exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work, Fluid Beauty, investigates the continued relevance that his photographs have in contemporary culture. In an age where notions of identity are being continuously asserted, challenged, and changed, the function and necessity of traditional gender roles has become a fervently argued debate. Fluid Beauty explores the strength of women and the vulnerability of men beyond political opinion, personal definition, and public expression. The exhibition addresses preconceived rules about what it really means to be male, to be female, and to belong, both within the body and within society. Fluid Beauty seeks out androgyny, finding beauty in the absence of definition.

• Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) was born in New York. He earned a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he produced artwork in a variety of media, mainly collage. The shift to photography as Mapplethorpe’s sole means of expression happened gradually during the mid-seventies. He took his first photographs of his close friend, the singer-artist-poet Patti Smith, using a Polaroid camera, and later became known for his portraits of composers, architects, socialites, stars of pornographic films, members of the S&M underground, and an array of other unique people, many of whom were personal friends. Mapplethorpe had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1976.

  During the early 1980s, his photographs shifted to emphasize classical formal beauty, concentrating on statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flowers, still life, and formal portraits. In 1988, four major exhibitions of his work were organized by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. These exhibitions, and the controversial works they presented, sparked an international and ongoing debate about public funding for the arts, censorship and other First Amendment concerns, as well as the definition of that which is considered art.

  Mapplethorpe died from AIDS on March 9, 1989, in Boston, at age 42. Since that time, his work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the world, including major travelling retrospectives. Robert Mapplethorpe’s work is widely collected, and he is considered by many art scholars to be among the most important American photographers of the latter half of the twentieth century.