On view October 13, 2018 - January 27, 2019

Death Is Black and White

Selections of Photography and Video from the Marc and Livia Straus Family Collection

Acknowledging the fragility and mortality of the human condition, Death Is Black and White confronts death in an unflinching and unmistakable way. These largely monochromatic photography and video works come together as a direct juxtaposition to and in conversation with Death Is Irrelevant, which is wholly sculptural, often garish, and largely tackles the subject matter obliquely.

Mapplethorpe fading behind a skull until only the skull remains. Lyle Ashton Harris’s unforgiving Polaroids. Maria Marshall’s video where she seems to be drowning her own child. Larry Clark’s Tulsa Series, the painful, beautiful works communicating in a way that few other things can, that hazy, angsty, slippery slope of the teenage years, with Clark’s photographs at the very abyss.

These pieces do not sidestep mortality and death. They do not jest or make light of it. They are at once unflinching, terrifying, and heartbreakingly beautiful.

Death Is Black and White: Selections of Photography and Video from the Marc and Livia Straus Family Collection is curated by Sarena Straus.

Featured Artists

Dieter Appelt (Germany), Gilles Berquet (France), Larry Clark (USA), Martin Eder (Germany), Ion Grigorescu (Romania), Lyle Ashton Harris (USA), Robert Mapplethorpe (USA), Maria Marshall (UK), Shirin Neshat (Iran), Mike and Doug Starn (USA)

Selected works