P·P·O·W is pleased to announce If I Could Attach Our Blood Vessels I Would: The Work of David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar, the gallery’s presentation at Paris+ par Art Basel 2023. This display will document through photographs, video, painting, and sculpture the inextricable connectedness between the works of Peter Hujar (1934-1987) and David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992). Correcting the often-cited misconception about their relationship as being solely or primarily “lovers,” the presentation will demonstrate their close friendship and profound influence on each other’s artwork throughout the 1980s.

Wojnarowicz wrote extensively about Hujar’s death and famously documented him on his hospital deathbed. Wojnarowicz’s last two shows, both presented at P·P·O·W, were complicated by his own HIV+ diagnosis and were simultaneously a critical response to “a sick society,” as well as a memorial to his friend, Hujar, about whom Wojnarowicz famously declared, “Everything I made, I made for Peter.” The title of our Paris+ presentation is excerpted from Wojnarowicz’s text and image work When I Put My Hands on Your Body (1990), which was exhibited that same year in his final exhibition at P·P·O·W, In the Garden.

Peter Hujar (1934 - 1987) was a leading figure in downtown New York’s cultural scene in the 1970s and early ‘80s. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of institutions worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Morgan Library and Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Tate Modern, London. Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was one of only two major monographs of the artist’s work published during his lifetime. The retrospective Peter Hujar: Speed of Life opened at Fundacion Mapfre, Barcelona, Spain in 2017, before traveling to Fotomuseum, The Hague, Netherlands, 2017; The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 2018; Berkeley Art Museum & Film Archive, University of California, 2018; and Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2020.