Keith Haring’s determination to fully incorporate his homosexuality as one of the indissoluble facets of his art – in spite of the homophobia and oppression that many of his predecessors had suffered throughout history – was the component triggering a huge movement in which artists no longer held back from positively expressing their homosexuality in their art. Unlike many homosexual artists who have long sought to maintain the clandestine, invisible character of their sexuality, in his own artistic expression Keith Haring found the means of affirming his pride in being gay through the very explicit homo-erotic character of his works. So his works are denoted by a defiance, a warning, a certain violence sometimes that disturbs the onlooker and bears witness to the dichotomy the artist was in as regards his work. This duality affects Keith Haring’s work and marks it deeply.
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Sex also appears in full realism as a guarantee of the durability of human relations and as the symbol of reconciliation, union and harmony between different entities.īut sex, symbol of the regeneration and transmission of life, soon becomes the vector of death when it appears in the early eighties as the specter of AIDS, that Keith Haring was to die of in 1990. Throughout his entire career, the way he portrays the male genitals reveals both unceasing, voracious and submerging desire, and is an allegory for nirvana. The erotic figures that he developed then resonated as the translation of the confidence necessary to any union acting on the loss, within that union, of the individuality of each of them.
Strongly marked by the atmosphere that reigned in the city, full of teeming life, carefree sex, brilliant colors and communal effervescence, Keith Haring was quickly noticed for the realism of his perception of the body and sexuality. Frequenting the backrooms and public baths where the gay community hung out, the sex that haunted his nights soon became the fruit and the main inspiration of his research. In 1978, at the height of the sexual revolution, Keith Haring arrived in New York and attended the School of Visual Arts. Throughout his life, from when he began in the late seventies up to his death in 1990, Keith Haring produced work that was both intense and explicit around sex and sexuality.
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So sex is not always free from the taboos that hem it in. Yet even today, Jeff Koons’s work, books and films by Virginie Despentes and Catherine Breillat, and the confessions of Catherine Millet continue to be on everyone’s lips. Boundaries have been breached, values have shattered and showing sex is increasingly permissible.
Thirty years have already gone by since the sexual liberation of the seventies. The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course I drew them anyway-they had the sexiest uniforms!" – Touko Valio Laaksonen (Tom of Finland), quote source: years after organizing the exhibitions Keith Haring – Made in France at the Musee Maillol and Keith Haring – 12 sculptures at the gallery, Jerome de Noirmont is pleased to present a Keith Haring exhibition entitled sex Show, from September 19 to November 16, that through a dozen canvases and some forty drawings, will highlight the crucial importance of sex and sexuality in the artist’s life and work. I am thinking only about the picture itself. "In my drawings I have no political statements to make, no ideology. Initially inspired by male laborers, his time in the army moved his artistic interest toward uniformed men. He destroyed all of them when the Finnish army conscripted him in 1940. At the age of 19, he started his studies in advertising while drawing erotic images in his spare time.
Touko Valio Laaksonen was born in 1920 in Kaarina, near Turku in Finland. His art revolves around strong gay masculinity, with men often clad in leather or uniform having joyful sex. He was friends with Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andy Warhol visited his first exhibition in a boot shop in 1978. Meet Tom of Finland, the artist that inspired the looks of Freddie Mercury and the Village People.