Visualize getting your decide of the Met’s treasures — from its galleries to its storerooms — and placing collectively your possess present.
Hey, it occurred to Piotr Ukla´nski, who’s starring in not 1 exhibit but two: a survey of his slyly subversive photographs, provocatively titled “Fatal Attraction,” and, in a second gallery, his selections from the Met’s collections.
For that he’s decided on about 80 pics, sculptures and paintings that dance all around Freud’s favorite interlocking poles of intercourse and demise. So specific are some that the Met’s posted a parental advisory at the gallery entrance.
As perfectly it ought to. You would not want your kids — or, for that matter, your mother — to eyeball, say, Larry Clark’s photograph of a humping pair, Vivienne Westwood’s T-shirt of a naked footballer or Dora Maar’s terrifying, surrealist photo of a pale, flippered, fetal armadillo.
But there is elegance listed here as well, notably Philippe Laurent Roland’s bust of a sleeping boy and Sarah Goodridge’s self-portrait of her personal luminous, bared breasts.
Polish by birth, New Yorker by choice, Ukla´nski’s labored in many media — film, fiber, even pencil shavings — but he’s principally a photographer. Born in 1968, he’s been around just very long more than enough to comment on all that’s long gone before, typically with bemused detachment.
States Met curator Doug Eklund: “He makes use of cynicism the way a painter utilizes a paintbrush.”
Take his “Joy of Photography” series, which manages to honor and at the very same time parody Eastman Kodak’s 1979 how-to guide. Ukla´nski’s soft-aim flowers seem like Easter eggs, a coconut tree appears bent on self-flagellation and a buttery sunlight drips into a darkish-blue sea.
Below and there are pictures of the artist himself. Glimpse carefully at that picture of a roaring tiger and Ukla´nski’s eyes stare again at you. As for that “skull” of interlocking woman nudes: Dalí went down that highway before, but Uklanski made it private — it’s his possess naked self there, in the center.
