REX has departed

REX (American, 1947-2024) Smoke Rings, 1985, Ink on paper, Tom of Finland Foundation permanent collection

We are sad to learn that the legendary artist REX has left us.

“When life dims, and the hand becomes too shaky to draw, with Rex, and with Tom, it becomes time to let the lamp extinguish. Artists continue to illuminate the world with what they created so their light will forever fill the darkness.”
–S.R. Sharp, 2024

Over the past five decades, REX meticulously detailed pen-and-ink drawings that delight and outrage a worldwide audience with their homoerotic subject matter, sometimes sweet and sometimes raw. Rex began creating homoerotica in the 1960s and lived and worked in Amsterdam.

“People say I’m stubborn just for the sake of being difficult–just to have my way. But I’m someone who has had to fight for decades against society, the law, church and state–even the art world itself–in order to get my art before the public uncensored. There is simply no “polite” way to battle against these great odds I have had to battle over over the past five decades. Saying “please” does not work when taking on these powerful, entrenched institutions. So I fear fighting the status-quo in the long run has made me rather abrasive and abrupt at times when trying to get my art before a society that essentially won’t allow it to be seen. Or rather, allow it to be seen on “my terms”. But my bark is worse than my bite.”
–REX, 2017

For producing his work he became “persona non grata” in the American art establishment which till this day still considers his work “too hot to handle” due to some of its subject matter. Since the 1960s he has lead a reclusive life as a cult figure and underground artist with an international reputation enabled through pirated reproductions of his work first in print, and today on the internet. Forbidden to exhibit his work uncensored in the US, he is currently having the first public exhibition of his uncensored work in over 15 years at Amsterdam’s CNCPT13 gallery in 2014. 

“Rex is one of the foremost artists of forbidden and politically incorrect sexual activity among men, his is more than merely “Gay art”. Rex the artist is a historian, a voyeur, a muckraker and a trouble maker, a provocateur, a sensualist and a hedonist, the sensitive and observant portrayer of a secret world…

The world of leather and denim, steamy basements and grimy garages, anonymous sweaty tops and groveling sexpigs is perfectly suited to his black & white detailed and moody pointillistic renderings.”
–Bob Mainardi, 2012

REX, From Advocate Men, April 1986

Rex is the contemporary master of pen and ink, has been creating his pointillist homoerotic dramas for decades. His hyper-masculine, sex obsessed denizens of the dimly lit lower depths of the id act out some of our darkest fantasies. rexwerk WEBSITE

Rex is well versed in the knowledge of our base cravings and desires and that same force has driven him to meticulously lay down scenarios that others dare not manifest. He has been adept at creating imagery that pays homage to that nature that gives us the strongest of erections with the most powerful of orgasms. Both Rex and Tom of Finland did not want to compromise their freedom of expression in exchange for getting the approval of the greater society in which we live.

“If you look at Rex’s work you will find the inspiration for a major thread of the adult Gay sex industry. First in New York where his work was the public face of now near mythical clubs such as the Mineshaft and the most famous of fetish bars, the Eagle, the Lure and Rawhide. Then in San Francisco where Folsom began, he was part of the fabric of both city’s Gay DNA.”
–Guy Burch, 2014

 

Published: 7th April 2024

Categorised in: News