Andres Serrano, photographer, grew up in New York. After leaving school at fifteen to pursue a career as an artist he attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School between 1967 and 1969. While studying photography, painting and sculpture, he worked in advertising, where he was given the position of art director. In the early 1980s Serrano began to create Dadaist-style works which often featured religious iconography, dead animals, the human form and body fluids. He began to exhibit his work in group shows in 1984 and in 1985 had his first solo show at the Leonard Perlson gallery in New York. Throughout his career, which has largely been in photography, Serrano’s work has addressed social and political issues including AIDS, homelessness, death and his own Catholic upbringing. In the late 1980s Serrano’s 1987 photograph Piss Christ was at the centre of the American Culture Wars, prompting debate over freedom of expression and public funding of artists’ work (during his controversial career he has received numerous awards and grants including the National Endowment of the Arts (1986), The New York Foundation for the Arts (1987) and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (1989)). Catholic Archbishop George Pell sought to have Piss Christ excluded from a Serrano retrospective at the NGV in 1997; exhibited, the work was vandalised. Serrano’s most significant recent series America (2001-2003) reflects on what the diversity of America looked like in the wake of the 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks. The series of 112 portraits includes celebrities, homeless persons, a Playboy bunny and a boy scout. Serrano’s work is held in the collections of many public institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, The National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
