Robert Morgan
Saints & Martyrs
Sheriff Gallery - Paris, France
February 1 - February 28, 2026
Special thanks to 21c Museum Hotel and the Faulkner Morgan Archive for providing the works for this exhibition.
For his first Parisian exhibition, Bob Morgan presents a body of work that condenses a lifetime of creation, commitment, and marginality. Born in Kentucky in 1950 and raised in a Catholic family steeped in ancient rites, Bob Morgan grew up in what he himself describes as the "old world": Latin mass, solemn liturgy, icons of saints and martyrs whose stories — and instruments of torture — left a lasting mark on his imagination.
His mother, herself an artist, almost officially designated him early on as "the artist" of the five siblings. One day in middle school, when students had to introduce themselves to the class, Bob stood up and declared: "Hello, I'm Bob Morgan and I'm an artist." The class laughed. He never wavered.
From a very young age, he began photographing, sculpting, and assembling. He built altars to friends who died of AIDS. And above all, he welcomed people. A community formed around him: queer, marginal, radical. His studio became a refuge, a space for speech, visibility, and desire. Bob Morgan did not document this community — he was part of it.
The Parisian exhibition, titled Saints and Martyrs, reveals this deep bond with all the beings who have surrounded him, and still do. It brings together two major bodies of work.
The first consists of photographs directly inspired by religious imagery — portraits of saints, votive candles. But here, the idols have new faces. Bob Morgan portrays what he calls, not without affection, "stereotypical losers": young men marked by alcohol, delinquency, addiction, sometimes armed, often excessive. Photographed mainly in the early 2000s, these subjects were sometimes known to him for only a few hours or days. Yet in the intensity of their gaze, in the direct contact with the lens, a trust takes hold.
These men, rarely seen as anything other than social problems, become icons here. Secular saints. Their sexuality is omnipresent, raw, sometimes violent — but always sublime. In Bob Morgan's work, beauty is never moral. It is carnal, tragic, and radiant.
The second body of work, more recent and produced last year, takes the form of "souvenir plates." These decorative plates, made in England, evoke the bourgeois Anglo-Saxon imagination: portraits of the Pope, the royal family, figures of power frozen in tradition. Bob Morgan subverts this domestic object by affixing to it the publicly available arrest photos — mugshots — of those same subjects. Bad boys sanctified by porcelain.
Through these two bodies of work, Bob Morgan frontally upends the codes of the Church, American Puritan morality, and social respectability. He elevates those whom these institutions condemn. He inverts the hierarchy of the gaze. Morgan recounts that his subjects-turned-heroes participate, speak, and open up. Many enjoy this sudden stardom, this unexpected recognition through the lens. With humor, the artist even confesses to dreaming of opening a "souvenir shop" in prisons — to sell mugs and plates to the families of young inmates.
At 77, Bob Morgan continues to work with the same radicalism. Photographer, sculptor, and performer, he was one of the founding members of early queer underground groups, notably including the Pagan Babies — a cross-dressing performance collective later decimated by the AIDS epidemic, which took to the streets as a space of creation and resistance, drawing on the aesthetics of Hollywood noir and the films of Jean Cocteau. A defining figure of the counterculture in Lexington, Kentucky, he has exhibited for decades in artist-run spaces, far from the dominant institutional circuits. Only very recently has his work found its way into certain local museums.
His work is shot through with violence, desire, and loss — but also with an absolute loyalty to his subjects. As he himself puts it: "I'm an artist, not a social worker. I do activism. I educate. But I don't think we can save people."
Some of his saints and martyrs are dead. Others have survived. But all are now fixed, transfigured, and elevated by the art of Bob Morgan — beyond all judgment. And beyond time.
- Boris Bergman