Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano was born in 1950 in New York City to a Catholic family of Honduran and Haitian heritage. He studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School between 1967 and 1969 and is largely self-taught as a photographer. Working in large-format Cibachrome, he developed a practice rooted in the tension between sacred iconography and the materiality of the human body — a tension that would make him one of the most debated American artists of the late twentieth century.

The works that established Serrano's international reputation emerged from two series made between 1986 and 1990. Blood Cross (1985) placed Christian symbolism directly within bodily matter, anticipating the strategy that would define the Immersions series. Piss Christ (1987), a Cibachrome depicting a crucifix submerged in urine, became one of the most contested American photographs of its decade, igniting sustained public argument over blasphemy, artistic freedom, and the boundaries of publicly supported art. Piss Pope, Part I and II (1988) extended the same method to papal imagery, deepening Serrano's examination of institutional religion and the photographic capacity to transform taboo materials into formally luminous images. Works from this period, including Blood Cross and Piss Pope, are held in the Rennie Collection. During these years Serrano received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1986, an award from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1987, and a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in 1989.

Serrano's practice has continued to expand across portraiture, political imagery, and documentary-inflected series. Istanbul (Sisters) (1996), held at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, reflects his sustained interest in religious symbolism and the politicized body beyond an American context. His work enters the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and the Groninger Museum, among many others. Solo presentations have taken place at the Petit Palais and La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, Fotografiska in both New York and Stockholm, the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, and the Musée Maillol in Paris in 2024, alongside group exhibitions at the Pompidou Center, Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Pinault Foundation's Punta della Dogana in Venice, among others. Since 2012 he has been represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels, with solo exhibitions there spanning Sacramentum: Sacred Shadows (2012), Cuba (2014), Torture (2016), Infamous (2019), The Robots (2022), The Doom of Beauty (2023), and A Personal Mythology: Immersions and Bodily Fluids (1986–1990), opening in November 2025. A further solo exhibition, Andres Serrano: Incarnate, is scheduled at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery from June to November 2026.