Mark Morrisroe (1959–1989) — Exhibition Announcement Card, ClampArt, New York, 2011

Exhibition announcement card
Approx. 15 × 10 cm
Offset print on card stock
Published by ClampArt, New York
Exhibition dates: 24 March – 30 April 2011
Condition: good vintage condition; light handling wear and minor surface marks consistent with storage and age

Issued for a 2011 solo exhibition dedicated to Mark Morrisroe at ClampArt in New York, produced simultaneously with the major survey Mark Morrisroe: From This Moment On at Artists Space. Together the two exhibitions contributed to a broader re-examination of Morrisroe’s short but influential career and his position within late twentieth-century photography.

The card reproduces Self Portrait (1980 / photogravure edition printed 1996), an image that condenses much of Morrisroe’s practice into a single frame: intimacy, performance, vulnerability, and self-invention. Rather than presenting portraiture as stable documentation, Morrisroe treated the photograph as a mutable surface — manipulated through layered negatives, reprinting, and darkroom intervention. His images frequently move between autobiography and fiction.

Associated with the Boston School alongside figures such as Nan Goldin and David Armstrong, Morrisroe photographed friends, lovers, and underground communities with an immediacy that resisted polished documentary conventions. The work sits between diaristic record and constructed persona, preserving both closeness and instability.

Within a New Rare inventory this card functions as a secondary record of a second life: a contemporary exhibition built around posthumous circulation, where the image continues to move through archive, institution, estate, and print support.

Original period item. Shipping and handling included in the listed price.