Author Description

For more than twenty-five years, Los Angeles-based collectors Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard have built a world-class collection of contemporary art that is focused on men and male identity as its subject matter. This exhibition features works from their vast holdings in photography. Guest curator Mario Codognato examines the lives of men in contemporary Western societies--with all their contradictions--through themes of competition and solidarity, confrontation with identity, and diverse explorations of the body and sexuality (as both sign and experience). Together, these thematic groups form a fictional, somewhat idealized, tale in thirteen chapters, inviting viewers to reflect upon their own stories as well.Drawing upon the Hergott Shepard collection as well as select works gifted by the collectors to the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the exhibition will include more than sixty works by some of the most important names in late twentieth and early twenty-first century art, including Doug Aitken, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Rineke Dijkstra, Gilbert and George, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie, Herb Ritts, Thomas Ruff, Andres Serrano, and Wolfgang Tillmans.