David Wojnarowicz

Wojnarowicz had a traumatic childhood and adolescence as the son of a violent and alcoholic father who worked as a merchant seaman on the SS United States. In the large four-panel painting, Dad's Ship (1984), Wojnarowicz depicts an ocean liner ablaze in flames. Throughout his life, rivers, lakes, and oceans offered Wojnarowicz a sanctuary, and in his work, water is often linked to dreams and myths of emergence, purification and metamorphosis. Dad's Ship was first presented as part of an installation at New York's Gracie Mansion Gallery in 1984. It was with this installation that Wojnarowicz first began to address the traumatic events of his childhood in his visual art. The installation also included the burning boy - a child-size mannequin and avatar for Wojnarowicz - collaged with torn up maps and with flames on the backs of his limbs, torso and head running away from the ship on a bed of sand representing the bottom of the sea. Suspended above the boy and in front of the painting was a large fiberglass model of a shark, also covered in map fragments. Untitled (Shark) (1984) - is presented here with Dad's Ship (1984) for the first time since their original installation. Wojnarowicz often included imagery of animals in his work as signifiers of purity, wisdom and nature - like him, "outsiders" on the periphery of the man-made world. For Wojnarowicz, maps were a metaphor for government and signified the arbitrary nature of manmade borders and other established divisions. By tearing, cutting and reconfiguring them, he expressed the randomness of both man-made borders and the divisions between "civilization" and nature.

Retrospectives of Wojnarowicz's work have been held at the University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal, IL (1990), the New Museum, New York, NY (1999), and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, traveling to the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City (2018-19). A concurrent exhibition of Wojnarowicz's films and photographs opened at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany in 2019. Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker, a comprehensive feature-length documentary about the artist's life and work premiered in November 2020. Last year, P·P·O·W and the David Wojnarowicz Foundation mounted a citywide series of programs in celebration of the artist's would-be 70th birthday, with screenings, performances, and activations taking place at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art; and the NYC AIDS Memorial. His works can be found in institutional collections around the world.