ON VIEW THROUGH 11th August
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY: +1 213 250 1685

EAMON McGIVERN Raoul Bejerano, 2025

If you are familiar with Tom of Finland’s work you may recognize some of the faces within the paintings in this show. About half of the paintings are based on photographs of Tom’s friends and lovers here in L.A. I am fascinated by the vast gap between the photographic images of these men and the fantasies they became through Tom’s drawings. By posing for Tom’s camera, they offered themselves up to his erotic imagination where everyone is youthful, impossibly fit, well endowed, masculine, virile and versatile. The homogeneity of his figures creates a kind of egalitarianism where violent societal power structures collapse into a carnivalesque orgy.

It’s easy to see the appeal of this fantasy world, when in reality we must navigate the collective erotic imagination informed by class, race, age, body type and gender presentation. Whether the scripts associated with the roles we inhabit align with or are antagonistic to our desires, we all contend with how our bodies are perceived. These paintings are an exploration of how we as Queer men grapple with the archetypes available to us in order to make ourselves legible to the desires of other men.

–Éamon McGivern

AVAILABLE WORKS

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday 31st July from 6-9p
Join us on this special evening celebrating his accomplishments.

The program will include an artists talk with McGivern and former Artist-in-Residence Carta Monir as well as performances by Peter Kalisch, Emily Lucid and Cade Moga. 

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Meet Éamon McGivern, Artist-in-Residence

Welcome Éamon! Éamon McGivern is a painter from San Francisco who over the last seven years has painted portraits of Bay Area Queers, punks and poets. More recently, he has been delving into the archives of twentieth century LGBTQ+ history, picking up strands from holes in the historical narratives in an attempt to darn the tears between the past and present wrought by political oppression, transphobia and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. McGivern’s work feeds into the sorrow borne from the absence…