In Bank Holiday Monday (1937), queer desire unravels in plain sight within a crowded carnival ground. The kaleidoscopic painting, by British nonbinary artist Gluck, centers on two fashionable, androgynous figures: One, with close-cropped brown hair (like the artist’s own), looms over her peroxide-blond partner’s shoulder, seductive and sinister. The two are physically present in the scene, standing in the trash-strewn grass, but seem to exist in a bubble—speaking a language of forbidden yearning and coded self-expression.
These are the visual cues on view throughout “Queer Modernism: 1900 to 1950,” a comprehensive new exhibition of over 130 works by 34 artists at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen’s K20 space in Düsseldorf, Germany. ewriting a half-century of Western art history through a queer lens is noble—and necessary. Although modernism was defined by its rejection of traditional values and embrace of experimentation, it was a cadre of straight, white, male artists like Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh who came to dominate the canon. The new exhibition reframes modernism as a movement shaped by queerness, not merely touched by it.
It happened at night. There I was, in the midst of my ritualistic brain-smoothing exercise of scrolling through social media until I lose all sense of space and time. Suddenly, I saw evil incarnate: another drab, grey backdrop haunting a fashion magazine cover. This time, the demon appeared on the first issue of 72, a confusingly named print publication launched last week by fashion industry mainstay Edward Enninful, the former editor-in-chief of British Vogue.
For issue 001, cinematic icon Julia Roberts is reduced to a pallid imitation of herself—giving high fashion “smize” when her radiant smile is her best asset—while awkwardly posed and badly styled; the combination of a dark grey coat with a dark grey collared shirt, accessorized with chunky, matronly jewelry, and set against the drab grey backdrop feels a hate crime. Even the text is a mess; the 72 is rendered in a violent shade of electric pink, the list of celebrities in the issue is centered under it in yellow, while “Julia Roberts interviewed by George Clooney” is written in three font sizes, spaced across two lines, and uses two mismatched font colors. Squinting to see the “POWERED BY EE72” in the top right corner just confirms that this entire production has the vibe of a corporate-funded, in-flight magazine.
On a small, princess-pink television on the fifth floor of the WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, an animated bear smokes a blunt as a spectral voice recounts a run-in with the police that nearly devolved into violence. The film is Nigerian-American poet Precious Okoyomon’s ‘It’s dissociating season’ (2019), and the narrator is her brother. Rendered on a Disney-branded TV, and shown thousands of miles from the U.S., Okoyomon’s defanging of America’s racist, state-sanctioned carceral system is darkly funny, and deeply surreal. Though that may be, in part, thanks to the hazy glow of pink-tinted windows framing the small room that Okoyomon’s work occupies.
The incisive video is just one of many to be found in WIELS’ sweeping new exhibition, ‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order.'
Graffiti is an art form of the people. From the moment aluminum spray paint was patented in 1951 for use on steam radiators, the readymade canisters have been co-opted to create. It was communities of Black and Hispanic teenagers in the outer boroughs of New York City who formed the first epicenter for the medium; the young taggers targeted subway cars, alleyways, trash cans—anywhere they could reach. Spray paint came to be seen as a tool of disobedience, amplified further by its use in the 1968 student and worker protests across France. The rapid proliferation of tagging and the draconian public policy campaigns to erase it gave graffiti a bad reputation almost immediately. Street art became the domain of vandals and troublemakers, a scourge on cities and the army of power-washers attempting to scrub it away. But like a plant sprouting up through the cracks in the pavement, graffiti endured.
Over seven decades after its inception, tags can be seen all around the world—including via quick flashes glanced from a high-speed train heading to Bolzano. It’s in this northern Italian city that Museion has opened ‘Graffiti,’ the first Italian institutional exhibition to focus on the medium’s deep impact on contemporary art. It’s through the show that its co-curators, Museion’s Leonie Radine and New York-based artist, archivist and graffiti writer Ned Vena, have succeeded in rewriting the graffiti’s muddled narrative.
Refik Anadol had Mark Rothko on his mind last week as he unveiled “Living Architecture: Gehry,” an AI-powered reimagining of Frank Gehry’s architectural legacy at the Guggenheim Bilbao. “I’m hoping that this artwork not only talks about technology but really talks about where we are going,” Anadol shared during the exhibition’s opening press conference. “Rothko said, ‘My work is a place.’ I feel that Gallery 208 [where the work is installed] is a place. It’s a place where we wonder, we question, we really deep dive into the issues of life.”
It wasn’t a newsroom or even a debate stage that signaled the state of political reporting; it was a podcasting studio whose decor looked ripped from a Netflix dating series. Under bland sterile lighting were two mustard yellow, faux-retro chairs and, of course, a stack of merch hoodies folded just right to display the show’s name: Call Her Daddy. On this episode of Alex Cooper’s blockbuster hit show (it was Spotify’s second-most-listened-to podcast in the world in 2023, behind only The Joe Rogan Experience), the guest was Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Precise, smooth, and powerful:” the sexual energy rippling through Gillette’s 2004 ad campaign nearly leaps from the page — not because razors were suddenly sexy, but because its star, David Beckham, was known at the time as “the biggest metrosexual in Britain.” With a freshly shaved head, glistening muscles, and a green-tipped razor in hand, the image cemented what the world already knew, by way of a £40 million global ad campaign. This British soccer star — this man who wore pink nail polish and, occasionally, his wife’s panties — was seen as the peak of masculinity that year, and nobody else came close. As Gillette’s tagline went, Beckham was “the best a man can get.”
This story appears as part of 2004 Was So Gay, Them’s look back at a pivotal year for queer history and pop culture.
Deep within the cavernous Arsenale di Venezia, amidst hundreds of works on view at the 60th edition of the Biennale, two paintings by Peruvian artist Violeta Quispe offer an invitation into a queer, gender-breaking multiverse. The works — El Matrimonio de la Chola (2022) and Apu Suyos (2024) — are a patchwork of nearly 100 characters pulled from Andean traditions of Quechua culture, recontextualized and filtered through a prism of sexual and gender equity. The inspiration for these colorful pieces comes from an adolescence spent navigating Lima’s deep conservatism. “This led me to ask myself, where do I place myself in the nature of a society where ‘those minorities’ are found and marked by the society of a country that, unfortunately, still has patriarchal, racist, classist, homophobic and sexist thinking?” Quispe told ARTnews in a recent interview. “My origin is part of my blood, my touch, my art, my customs and my identity.”
Down a cold, cement staircase and through a cavernous tunnel somewhere in Berlin, Ai Weiwei sits quietly at a long table in a brick hall. It’s early, and as the city outside begins to wake up, Ai is busy scrolling through his phone and sipping tea. A few feet away, sunlight streams into an open courtyard set two floors below ground. There’s a serenity and completeness to the scene because, in a way, this former brewery turned underground art studio is a perfect metaphor for the artist’s journey. Here, in what he calls his “underground temple,” Ai has found peace and come full circle.
This story appears as a FRONTPAGE digital cover story and in their Spring 2022 print magazine.
