A Lover’s Impact on David Wojnarowicz, for All to See
During an eight-month visit to Paris when he was 24, David Wojnarowicz embarked on his first serious love affair and began to take himself seriously as a visual artist.
The full import of these changes became evident after his return to New York in June 1979, once he uncorked a stream of fervent letters to his lover, Jean Pierre Delage, and included drawings, photographs and other art work.
That epistolary record, complemented by related paintings by Wojnarowicz, is the subject of “Dear Jean Pierre: The David Wojnarowicz Correspondence,” an exhibition at PPOW gallery through April 23.
Although the biographical films and articles that accompany Wojnarowicz’s posthumous fame give more attention to his deep friendship with the photographer Peter Hujar and to the six-year relationship with Tom Rauffenbart, which endured until Wojnarowicz’s death from AIDS in 1992, Delage played an important, less well understood role.
