David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-92)
Untitled (Face in Dirt), 1990
“The artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-92) was tall and bony, with buck teeth, a preternaturally deep speaking voice and a long face that tapered like a garden spade. He was, as Cynthia Carr observes in “Fire in the Belly,” her thorough and sensitive new biography, “so ugly he was beautiful.”
Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch) was a painter, a photographer, a writer, a performance artist, a filmmaker and an AIDS activist — he was gifted at all these things, save perhaps filmmaking — whose work helped define the anarchic downtown Manhattan art scene in the 1980s. Much of his stuff was so resolutely ugly that it too shone with a defiant sort of beauty.” - Dwight Garner, NYT
