miart 2026

Mapplethorpe/Benassi

Booth B07

16.04. – 19.04.

For Miart 2026, Mai 36 Galerie is pleased to announce a duo presentation that brings together Italian artist Jacopo Benassi and late American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, establishing a resonant dialogue that bridges generations and expressions in the medium of photography.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s groundbreaking photographic practice is highlighted with selected works produced throughout the 1980s, in which the camera consistently operates as a sculptural instrument. Mapplethorpe insisted on the studio as a space of controlled transformation. His formal symmetry, clear tonal gradations, and ruthless attention to texture gave every subject, whether a calla lily, a torso, or a human face, the quality of an object fully realized in three dimensions. His nudes, among them his celebrated series with bodybuilder Lisa Lyon and his studies of Black male models consciously evoking antique precedents such as Hercules, press photography toward sculpture.

It is this sculptural intelligence, this instinct to give photographic matter the density and autonomy of an object, that opens the dialogue with Jacopo Benassi. Where Mapplethorpe achieves his three-dimensionality through the control of studio light and the perfection of the print, Benassi arrives at a comparable objecthood by different means: through mixed-media assemblages that bind his black-and-white photographs to painterly surfaces, physical substrates, and sculptural interventions, dismantling the boundary between image and object. Both artists refuse photography its flatness. Both insist on the photograph as body, something that occupies space, bears marks, and demands to be confronted physically.

Mapplethorpe’s work is haunted by the tension between idealization and exposure, between the perfection of form and the vulnerability of the flesh beneath it. Benassi’s practice is equally rooted in the unstable territory between self-construction and self-dissolution, between intimacy and wound. Desire, mortality, and the body as a site of inscription resonate across both bodies of work, rendered through a formal language of exceptional rigor and physical directness.

Mai 36 Galerie’s duo presentation is drawing viewers into a profound engagement with two artists for whom the image is inseparable from the object, and beauty is inseparable from risk.

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Image 1: Robert Mapplethorpe, NYC Contemporary Ballet, 1980 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Image 2: Jacopo Benassi, Mano, 2026