Arthur Rimbaud in New York

David Wojnarowicz was a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist whose work as a painter, writer, performer and activist melds the personal with the political. Themes such as structural violence, gay sexuality, repression and death run through his work, which becomes an urgent, poetic, deeply human chronicle of his time.

Arthur Rimbaud in New York is one of his most emblematic series, one of his rare forays into photography. Donning a mask of the cursed poet Arthur Rimbaud, Wojnarowicz constructs a fragmented, multifaceted portrait of a New York in the midst of urban, social and political upheaval. Using his friends as models in public spaces, piers, porn cinemas and the subway, he draws parallels between the poet’s life and his own: a youth marked by violence, the rejection of bourgeois norms, their shared homosexuality and a radical desire to live on the margins. At a time prior to the outbreak of the AIDS crisis, the series captures the last collective vibration of the Lower East Side’s queer art scene before its disintegration.

Raúl Martínez Arranz