Gay Love in Pictures

Exhibition curated by VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis)
Participating artists: Kostis Fokas, Konstantinos Ladianos, Aggelos Papadimitriou, Ilias Papailiakis, Dimitris Papaioannou, VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis)
Organized by The Eight, a critical institute for arts and politics, with the support of NEON Organization for Culture and Development

Gay Love in Pictures is an exhibition that explores homoerotic sensitivity as it is reflected in the present time, through the work of six artists living and working in Athens. Through the use of traditional techniques and mediums of representation (painting, photography, sculpture) but also hybrid or conceptual practices, an “other” subject matter is approached, a powerful eroticism that claims visibility but also its “normalization”, its representations.
The reception of a work of art in the context of homosexual desire poses a twofold challenge: moving away from the abstraction for the sake of a “statement” (representational or conceptual) of desire and, at the same time, moving away from the “death of the author” theories for the sake of a biographical “statement”. We are dealing here with a return to the specific, to the historically and biographically determined. The simple – often judged obsolete – questions about a work of art “What does it depict?” “Whom does it depict?” “Who created it?” “What was their intention?” acquire a key character here and charge the projects automatically and naturally with a claiming power.
The joyful and profane painting of Konstantinos Ladianos, the double self-referential portraits of VASKOS (Noulas-Tzimoulis), the intertextual and playful works of Angelos Papadimitriou, the dark oil paintings and the drawings of Ilias Papailiakis, the familiar recordings of the personal time of Dimitris Papaioannou, and the naked intertwined bodies of Kostis Fokas compose a representative sample of modern iconography of gay love. The exhibition Gay Love in Pictures is like saying: Things are simple, things are right in front of our eyes and they are beautiful! Look at them!

11 May -12 June 2021
The Eight, a critical institute for arts and politics, Politehneiou 8, Athens

PRESS
20/06/2021 AVGI
Anagnoseis tis Avgis [gr]
Images from the exhibition “Gay Love in Pictures” featuring in Anagnoseis tis Avgis

16/05/2021 LIFO
“Gay Love in Pictures”: A contemporary athenian iconography of gay love [gr]
by Argyro Bozoni

NEON Grants | VASKOS | Gay Love in Pictures [Eng / gr]