Andres Serrano — Galerie Nathalie Obadia
Presented at the Nathalie Obadia gallery, the first emblematic works of Andres Serrano allow us to return to the source of an œuvre that, from its emergence in the 1980s, was shaped through a play of reversals and frictions. These early works belong neither to mere provocation nor to an isolated iconoclastic gesture. They immediately establish a regime of the image based on the collision between plastic heritage and symbolic breach, between formal seduction and the dissolution of the values it seemed to guarantee.
For some forty years, Andres Serrano has practiced the art of recoil, slipping the liquidation of systems of value into a praise of the plastic image. More free and independent than truly provocative, his work handles symbols like stones in a counter mythology that builds the inner chamber of its own melancholy.
Like a flamboyant precipitate of a modernity fully entering its post reality, the society of the 1980s and 1990s, photography, which he takes up after suspending his pictorial practice, diverts its classical heritage while extending its fascination. By appropriating the vanitas in its most explicit form, in its immediate materiality and fragility, Serrano strips it of its “lucidity”. The illusion had long since fled, so it might as well be definitively put to the test by drowning its idols and exhibiting their spectacle.
And first of all by emptying oneself, emptying others, by composing large abstractions made of blood, milk, semen, and emptiness. The Serrano cyclone thus immediately imposes the weight of his Christian heritage, sets it down, and reopens the question of the image. Has this Christ turned into an object not become the vehicle of the most human of passions? That of fear, of vulnerability to suffering, and to the atrocity of a condition that the artist seeks to make explicitly felt.
They remind us that behind the excess there fundamentally emerges a desire for form, a pleasure in color and material that makes the image first and foremost a vector of emotion and desire, a sensitive and definitively shareable doubt that ensnares beliefs and activates our longing for form.
Andres Serrano, A Personal Mythology: Immersions and Bodily Fluids (1986–1990), from November 10 to January 17, 2026, galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, 75004 Paris, Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
