Tom of Finland’s homoerotic world-building helped pioneer the Queer zine

24th January 2023, 3:20 pm

 

 

The Queer Finnish illustrator changed the world’s erotic imagination. A new exhibition at David Kordansky in New York draws out how he achieved it.

 

“I don’t even remember there not being a Tom of Finland,” said the writer Brontez Purnell at a panel to launch Tom of Finland: Highway Patrol, Greasy Rider, and Other Selected Works, on a rainy January night. David Kordansky Gallery’s recently opened Manhattan outpost was packed to hear him, along with the artist Nayland Blake, the Drawing Center’s chief curator Claire Gilman, and Tom of Finland Foundation co-founder Durk Dehner, all gracefully corralled by the gallery’s Julie Niemi.

The crowd laughed and nodded at Purnell’s impossible truth. Whether or not we were there to see it firsthand, of course, the world existed before Tom of Finland began thrusting his technically astonishing, unabashedly explicit illustrations of swole men with swollen members into the hands of anyone who would take it. But it’s true, because once he got around, their sui generis sexiness slipped into the very fabric of 20th-century America.

Tom of Finland took centuries of homoerotic art—from Greek warriors cruising each other across ancient wine vessels through Michelango’s muscle studies, George Platt Lynes’s graphic early-20th-century photographs of male bodies in shadows to Physique Pictorial’s porn-as-wellness-tutorials—as tools. Also in his box? The inflated glamour of advertising and cheap thrills of comics. Both show up in the preparatory collages of male models smoking and leather-clad bikers on their hogs. Across the gallery, illustrations show Tom’s process of isolating the parts of the body that signify masculinity and then queering them.

READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE BY JESSE DORRIS

 

 

 

 

 

 


TOM OF FINLAND “Highway Patrol, Greasy Rider, and Other Selected Works”

13th Jan 2023 – 25th Feb 2023 @ All Day – Tuesday–Saturday, 10a–6p   Tom of Finland: Highway Patrol, Greasy Rider, and Other Selected Works features collages and drawings by the iconic artist. At the center of the exhibition is a full suite of impeccably rendered drawings from the series Kake vol. 21 – “Greasy Rider” (1978) and Kake vol. 22 – “Highway Patrol” (1980), both of which reference Tom’s collages and […]

Panel discussion and opening reception for TOM OF FINLAND “Highway Patrol, Greasy Rider, and Other Selected Works”

12th Jan 2023 @ 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm –   Join us in New York for a discussion on Tom of Finland’s life, work, and cultural impact, featuring Nayland Blake, Durk Dehner, Claire Gilman, and Brontez Purnell. The discussion will be followed by an opening reception at 6:30p for Tom of Finland: Highway Patrol, Greasy Rider, and Other Selected Works, an exhibition of collages […]

Published: 24th January 2023

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