ARTWORK

This is a color photograph shot at an angle of a naked woman in a bathtub.
Pre-Nympho Pia, Young Pia Howard (Nude in Bathtub)

1982

Signed and dated, l.r.

Vintage chromogenic print (negative sandwich)

20 x 16 inches, sheet
15 3/8 x 15 3/8 inches, image

Contact gallery for price.

Literature:
Klaus Ottmann, Mark Morrisroe (Twin Palms Publishers: Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1999), p. 48, full-page color illus.
Manuel Segade, ed., Familiar Feelings: On the Boston Group (Xunta de Galicia, Consellería de Cultura e Turismo, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea: Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2009), p. 102, color illus. [another example]
Isla Leaver-Yap, “A Necessary Desire,” Mousse (September/October 2010), p. 79
Beatrix Ruff and Thomas Seelig, Mark Morrisroe (Fotomuseum Winterthur/JRP Ringier: Winterthur, Switzerland, 2010), p. 148, full-page color illus.

“Morrisroe developed a persistent motif of shooting his subjects in the bath or shower. One example is Pre-Nympho Pia, Young Pia Howard, 1982, which depicts his friend Howard stretched out in the bath, the angle of the camera skewed to fit her long body into the frame. This sandwiched print diffuses the harder lines of the bath, tiles, and water’s edge, giving a grainy patina that appears both intimate and classic. Like Pierre Bonnard’s paintings of his wife, the image is evocative of a painterly impressionism.”
—Isla Leaver-Yap

This photograph was made by Morrisroe while he was filming “Nymph-O-Maniac,” the longest and most ambitious of his Super 8 productions. In his essay “Lipstick Traces: The Films of Mark Morrisroe” in the Fotomuseum Winterthur catalogue (ibid., p. 311), MoMA Chief Curator Stuart Comer writes: “Midway through the film, the hyper-glamorous Pia Howard becomes the sole focus of Morrisroe’s camera as she takes a bubble bath and sings with a breathy voice about her sex life.”

Work by Mark Morrisroe (1959-1989)