Lot 141 D

„Joel-Witkin's photographs occupy a bizarre and intricate universe where boundaries between profane and holy, male and female, pain and pleasure, eroticism and necrophilia - between life and death - are constantly traversed. […] Joel-Peter Witkin stages artificial symbols from a store of the unreal and the unusual, an excessive erotic heat glows within some final existential stages of the human condition, and despite all their fantastic elements, ultimately his images remain committed to their own laws rather than the attitudes of winsome contemplation” (cited after Erik Stephan (ed.), Compassionate Beauty, exhib.cat. Galerie im Stadtmuseum Jena, Jena 2002, p. 8)