Mark Morrisroe lived a short, turbulent life and left behind intensely personal art. His friend Nan Goldin once wrote, “Mark was an outlaw on every front—sexually, socially, and artistically. He was marked by his dramatic and violent adolescence as a teenage prostitute with a deep distrust and a fierce sense of his uniqueness,” which he brought to his work as a performance artist and photographer, working in the Boston punk scene in the 1970s and in New York City in the 1980s. A selection of his “sandwich” prints are on view at Alexander and Bonin in New York City, in a show that opens October 15 and runs until December 22 in the gallery’s new space. Made by rephotographing his own images and combining the intermediate and original negatives to make muted, painterly prints, Morrisroe’s photographs are tender, frank, and intimate, with their borders often covered in scribbles and notes addressed to the people he made them for.
After his death from AIDS at the age of 30, Morrisroe’s archive of 2000 prints eventually ended up at the Ringier collection, housed at Fotomuseum Winterthur, and only those sold or given to friends during the artist’s lifetime are in circulation, making this show a rare chance to see his work.
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