Peter Hujar is best known for his powerful and piercing portraits of personalities, famous and behind the scenes, animals, and wrecked cars. Ranging from glamorous studio portraits to dark images in catacombs, Hujar’s work is known for the texture and poignancy with which he explores decay, sexuality, death, and the life we share in common. As Nan Goldin writes, “His pictures are exotic but not in a shallow, sensational way. Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh. His photographs of animals have that same rare empathy, they are like highly personal portraits.”
Posthumous exhibitions include Eyes Open in the Dark, which opened at Raven Row in London in 2025. Curated by Hujar’s biographer John Douglas Millar and Hujar’s close friend, artist and master printer Gary Schneider, the exhibition traveled to Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany in 2026. As part of the 2024 Venice Biennale, the Peter Hujar Foundation presented the first European exhibition of Portraits in Life and Death, a complete set of 41 photographs from Hujar’s legendary 1976 book of the same name. In 2017, Speed of Life opened at Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona and traveled to Fotomuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands; The Morgan Library & Museum in New York; the Berkeley Art Museum in California; and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Earlier solo exhibitions include a major show at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 2005, and a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1994, which traveled to Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. During his lifetime, Hujar’s work was featured in several solo exhibitions at venues in Europe.
