(b. 1950, New York City) lives and works in New York. For more than four decades Serrano has probed the fault lines between the sacred and the profane, using the camera as both scalpel and mirror. Rising to international attention with the emblematic Immersions series—most notably Piss Christ (1987)—he has since built a rigorously coherent body of work that confronts power, beauty, violence and belief with disarming clarity. Whether photographing corpses in The Morgue (1992), Ku Klux Klan members (Nomads, 1990), the homeless (Residents of New York, 2014), or contemporary icons in Infamous (2019-23), Serrano pares image-making down to its most direct, uncomfortable truth: to see is to reckon. Serrano ’s photographs have been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Musée Maillol, Paris (2024); Forum Groningen, Netherlands (2024); DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2023); and Fotografiska, Tallinn (2023). Major institutional presentations include the Whitney Biennial, New York; the Barbican Art Gallery, London; the Helsinki Art Museum; and Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. His work belongs to over seventy public collections worldwide, among them the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Vatican Contemporary Art Collection, Vatican City; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the National Gallery of Australia. Serrano is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France, 2017) and a National Academician (U.S., 2015). Publications dedicated to his practice include Torture (Éditions de l’Amateur, 2016), Salvation: The Holy Land (Hatje Cantz, 2016) and Holy Works (Damiani, 2012). With an unwavering commitment to visual candor, Andres Serrano continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary photography, challenging viewers to confront the visceral realities—spiritual, political and corporeal—that shape our time.
