The work is a large photograph by the American artist Andres Serrano that shows a crucifix suspended in an amber fluid that the artist identified as his own urine.Andres Serrano/Supplied
The Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton is planning to exhibit one of the most controversial art works of the 1980s this summer.
The gallery announced Tuesday that it will be showing Piss Christ (Immersions), a large photograph by the American artist Andres Serrano that shows a crucifix suspended in an amber fluid that the artist identified as his own urine. It will be on display from Thursday to Nov. 29.
The 1987 work became the centre of a censorship scandal after it was included in an art-prize exhibition that toured to Richmond, Va., in 1989. That show led to its denunciation by U.S. senators and symbolic cuts to the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which had given Mr. Serrano a grant and partly funded the exhibition and the prize. Piss Christ has been shown infrequently since then and was vandalized by fundamentalist Catholics when it was exhibited in Avignon, France, in 2011.
The work, and two others by Mr. Serrano, are on loan to the Beaverbrook from the collection of Vancouver real estate marketer Bob Rennie. He is a major collector of Mr. Serrano’s work, who purchased the vandalized version of Piss Christ from the artist and showed it at the former Rennie Museum in Vancouver in 2022.
“I wanted the damaged one,” Mr. Rennie said in an interview. “It’s social history of how controversial this work is.”
The exhibition also includes Mr. Serrano’s Blood Cross (Bodily Fluids) from 1985.Andres Serrano/Supplied
It will be the first time Mr. Serrano’s work, which was also shown in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver in the 1990s, will be exhibited in Atlantic Canada.
Mr. Serrano has always defended Piss Christ, arguing that as a Christian he has the right to use Christian symbols in his work. Art critics have often interpreted Piss Christ as a statement about the cheapening of the crucifix as a fashion accessory, while Mr. Serrano has pointed out that the crucifixion was a gory bodily event. The piece was part of several early series that combined images of bodily fluids and raw meat with religious icons and figures, confronting the viewer with the physical realities behind Christian symbolism. For example, one photograph showed a crucifix atop a pile of organs that appear to be actual human hearts.
“I am a Christian and I am an artist,” Mr. Serrano has said. “And as a Christian I have the right to use the symbols of the Church because they are the symbols of my faith.”
The artist's Piss Pope, Part I and II (Immersions) from 1988.Andres Serrano/Supplied
Mr. Rennie said that when Piss Christ and more recent works by Mr. Serrano were shown in Vancouver in 2022, viewers were much more shocked by his portraits of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (taken shortly before his death in jail in 2019) and U.S. President Donald Trump. In its day, however, the photograph, along with the nude photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, helped launch the culture wars of the 1990s, leading to political attempts to constrain NEA’s granting powers.
The Beaverbrook is showing the vandalized photograph to launch a series of installations that juxtapose more recent works with Salvador Dali’s Santiago El Grande, known familiarly as the Dali chapel. The large painting, depicting a giant figure of Saint James the Great, patron saint of Spain, on a rearing horse holding up a crucifix, was donated to the gallery in 1959 and moved into its own space after a 2017 renovation.
The exhibition also includes Mr. Serrano’s Blood Cross (Bodily Fluids) from 1985 and Piss Pope, Part I and II (Immersions) from 1988, both from Mr. Rennie’s collection.