Robert Mapplethorpe – LEATHER AND S & M UNDERGROUND

The exhibition explores the cult of the body and beauty as political claims. It examines the tension between desire, aesthetics, and power, presenting an immodest body that is magnified, asserted, and exposed in its most raw and exhibitionist forms. At the heart of the project lies the mythical Portfolio X by Robert Mapplethorpe, created in 1978 and presented for the first time in Europe in 1979 at the Jurka Gallery in Amsterdam. Accompanied by a catalogue that has since become legendary, this body of work marked the photographer’s first European exhibition, just six years after his controversial Backroom exhibition at the Light Gallery in New York in 1973, which propelled him into the spotlight. This early period of the artist’s career, rarely shown because it is considered too explicit, is nonetheless foundational. In it, Mapplethorpe asserts a carnal, direct gaze of absolute formal rigor. His images, imbued with classical beauty, sublimate queer sexuality, transforming desire into composition and provocation into beauty. Mastery of grain, light, and framing elevates eroticism to the status of contemporary sculpture.
 

A homosexual photographer who exposed himself through hypersexualized images, Mapplethorpe became, from the late 1970s onward, a central figure in an art of transgression and liberation, in which the body becomes a site of struggle and of identity affirmation. Presenting Portfolio X means returning to the origins of a gaze that is at once sexual and political, fragile and triumphant, and reaffirming that beauty—even in its most disturbing forms—remains a fundamental space of struggle for individual freedoms.

 
AROUND THE EXHIBITION

// Photo Brussels Festival— January 22 to February 22, 2026
// Late opening — Friday, January 23, until 9 p.m.
// Conversation on the work of Robert Mapplethorpe with Xavier Canonne, Director of the Musée de la Photographie de Charleroi, and Eric Mouchet — Wednesday, February 11, 6 p.m.

// Leather and S&M Underground (22.01-14.03.2026) | Brussels