Mark Morrisroe Exhibition

David Zwirner (34 E 69th St.)

This event has ended.

Curated by Ryan McGinley

David Zwirner presents Mark Morrisroe, curated by artist Ryan McGinley, at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York.

Known as Mark Dirt in his Boston punk days, the photographer and filmmaker Mark Morrisroe (1959–1989) was, in the words of his former boyfriend Jack Pierson, “magnetic and scary, … the most extreme person I had ever encountered.”1 Within his short life, Morrisroe produced a body of work that examined queer kinship, the performance of gender, and the intimacy of risk while experimenting formally with his chosen Polaroid medium. After capturing thousands of images as well as appropriating stills from his Super 8 films, Morrisroe further manipulated his photographs through a number of unconventional techniques, producing distinctive, dreamlike prints. In landscapes and portraiture, he documented his circle of friends, lovers, and himself. Many of Morrisroe’s subjects, including the likes of David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Pat Hearn, and Pierson, attended Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts or the Massachusetts College of Art; this group would become known as the Boston School. This selection of photographic work lushly re-creates the social context of a band of iconoclastic artists at the cusp of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and remembers a figure who lived and documented life at the periphery.