Tom of Finland “Highway Patrol, Greasy Rider, and Other Selected Works”

Tom of Finland Highway Patrol, Greasy Riders, and Other Selected Works, exhibition view, David Kordansky Gallery, New York, 2023. Photo: Jeff McLane, courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery, New York

We’re in the decade of Tom of Finland. From the major 2015 exhibition at Artists Space in New York City to Dome Karukoski’s 2017 biopic Tom of Finland, the legendary erotica artist has enjoyed renewed visibility and critical appraisal. A new exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery in New York asserts his central role as a forebear to twentieth-century Queer visual cultures. Situating his work in a longer genealogy of vernacular Queer comics and graphic novels, the show proposes to illuminate “the formal development of Tom’s figurative iconography firsthand.”

The stars of the show are two graphic narratives that feature Tom’s recurring character Kake: Highway Patrol (1980), which depicts a biker and two police officers knocking leather boots together, and Greasy Rider (1978), an equestrian-themed romp. In order to demonstrate how Tom drafted his erotic utopias, the show is bookended by a series of preparatory sketches and by reference collages that allude to the underground and mass-cultural sources of his visual language.

Seeing Tom’s original drawings always impresses, as his sumptuous figures nearly glow off the page. Soft gradations of graphite delicately shape the curvature of their forms; inky leather gleams in his confidently rendered pen drawings. Each of these images is a product of meticulous care, and in the most transfixing ones his microscopic attention captures some of the mysteries of desire. One transfixing image features a man gazing upon another man’s pectoral muscle, its form so exaggerated that it appears nearly spherical. His eyes, glazed over, are reverential yet curiously unfocused. Is he staring at his lover’s nipple or at some realm beyond it? Some of Tom’s most interesting work alludes to this depersonalized dimension of sexuality, in which the fantasy seems to supersede the object of desire itself.

Most instructive here are the handful of collages that Tom used as reference material. These assemblages are composed of series of images cut and pasted from various kinds of media: magazine advertisements, photographs, and more. Chiseled faces grin from remarkably similar angles in one collage, while motorcyclists careen down another. Stressing function over form through their hasty compositions, the collages collate visual artefacts from the worlds of mass culture and the Gay underground that Tom translated to his forms.

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Published: 21st February 2023

Categorised in: Art Offering, News