The brief life and tragic death of Francesca Woodman only seems to deepen the mystery of her powerful and provocative work. But who was she, beyond the adolescent artist whose haunted photographs are the epitome of American Gothic with a surrealist twist?
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The new exhibition and book Francesca Woodman: Portrait of a Reputation sets forth to find out by exploring the young artists artist’s coming-of-age period between 1975-1979. Featuring approximately forty unique vintage prints, as well as contact sheets, notes, letters, postcards, and other ephemera related to Woodman’s burgeoning career, Portrait of a Reputation considers how the artist developed her singular approach to exploring gender, representation, and sexuality by photographing her own body and those of her friends.
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Photographer George Lange, Woodman’s long-time friend, first met the young artist as a fellow photo student at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1976. “She was the real deal,” he writes in the introduction to the book. “She lived her art. She looked like her art. She had the vocabulary of art. Almost best of all, her images each week, which are some of the most famous of her brief career, blew me away.’
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