Michael Stipe, REM's leader, is also a visual artist: his big exhibition in Milan

The historic frontman of R.E.M., Michael Stipe (Decatur, 1960), presents himself to the Italian public in an unusual guise, that of a visual artist. In fact, the American band leader arrives in Milan, at the Fondazione ICA, with the major solo exhibition I have lost and I have been lost but for now I’m flying high, scheduled from Tuesday, December 12, 2023 to Saturday, March 16, 2024. The project, conceived especially for Fondazione ICA Milano, is curated by Alberto Salvadori, director of the institution. The exhibition focuses in part on portraiture, interpreted through a wide range of languages: from photography to ceramics, from sculpture to audio works. More than 120 works are presented in the spaces of Fondazione ICA Milan, including some never exhibited before and others of recent production. The resulting selection restores in detail the areas of Michael Stipe’s artistic research.

The project interweaves the concepts of homage and vulnerability, themes inherent in Stipe’s figurative and non-figurative representation of human beings. The title of the exhibition emerges from a conversation between the curator and the artist, in which Stipe identifies vulnerability as a driving force, radically challenging conventional considerations that negatively connote it as a responsibility to be assumed or a weakness. On the contrary, in the accelerated chaos of contemporary life, Stipe identifies vulnerability as a powerful survival tool and a broader philosophical approach to charting new paths.

Explains Michael Stipe in the dialogue with the curator published in the exhibition booklet, “Vulnerability becomes a superpower.... A map that describes the difficulties of our present while highlighting new opportunities and a renewed understanding of our importance, not only to ourselves, but also to those around us, to our communities, to our world. In this moment I choose to focus on the most precious commodity, the brilliance, beauty and playfulness of life. I have lost and lost, but for now I am flying high.”

Central inspiration and point of origin for the exhibition is Max Ehrmann’s famous poem Desiderata (1927). In particular, the works that directly allude to the poem, Desiderata2027 and Desiderata Teleprompter, deconstruct and reconfigure the original text, generously expanding and amplifying the themes of vulnerability within it through Stipe’s personal vision, which invites a broader interpretation by the audience.

The artist’s abiding interest in portraiture is represented in the exhibition through multiple media. Stipe began taking photographs at the age of 14, first portraying his heroes, including Freddie Mercury, the Ramones, Tom Verlaine, and Patti Smith, and later also documenting the community of artists and musicians in Athens, Georgia, of which he has been a central part since the early 1980s. In these relationships, which Stipe has built and maintained over the past four decades, mentorship, friendship, and collaboration mingle intimately.

For the exhibition, the artist has created works that embody and reflect the multiplicity of roles these people have played in his life, from their representation as subjects to their involvement in the physical creation of the works themselves. Artists Angie Grass and Libby Hatmaker are instrumental in the creation of the multimedia works interpreting Desiderata, while artist Michael Oliveri, Stipe’s production director, and ceramicist Caroline Wallner worked with him to create the sculptures. Photographer David Belisle, Stipe’s longtime studio manager, meticulously hand-printed each photograph included in the exhibition through a series of analog processes.

The photographic portraits in the exhibition reconstruct his most recent publication, often capturing very candid moments of his life in Athens Georgia, New York, the South of France, and Berlin. These works are an act of devotion to her loved ones, including her mother, two sisters and goddaughter, boyfriend (artist Thomas Dozol), and longtime friends, filmmakers Tom Gilroy and Jim McKay. The celebration of his friends results in a series of tributes to his heroes, rendered through Stipe’s idiosyncratic approach to non-figurative portraiture. These works take the form of complex sculptures composed of book covers without pages, made in collaboration with printer Ruth Lingen, each bearing the name of a subject as its title, using unlikely typographic and color choices as a means of channeling the essence of a given person’s character.

Through vulnerability, the exhibition as a whole aims to become a self-portrait in which Stipe’s personal and public life are able to exist in a myriad of forms that reflect the ways in which the artist moved and viewed the world during his lifetime. Accordingly, the works included represent a testament to his understanding of the human experience: a series of meaningful collisions of seemingly disparate energies, at once found and realized, analog and digital, generative and permeable, mysterious and revelatory.

In addition, on the occasion of the exhibition, the artist is presenting the publication Even the birds gave pause, Michael Stipe’s fourth volume of photographs published by Damiani Books, which includes a series of works that deepen the exploration of contemporary portraiture recounted in the exhibition.

The exhibition is also accompanied by a donation program designed for the occasion that complements Fondazione ICA MILANO’s pre-existing Membership program, with proceeds going to support the activities of Fondazione ICA Milano. Benefits offered to donors who wish to support the institution’s cultural programming include a numbered box set signed by the artist and containing Michael Stipe’s two most recent monographs and a limited edition black-and-white photographic print made by the artist, signed and numbered.

More information is available at www.icamilano.it

Michael Stipe, REM's leader, is also a visual artist: his big exhibition in Milan

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