Read Our Interview of Ireland Wisdom On the Erotic Gaze & the Art of Looking →

Portrait by Austin Sandhaus

In this intimate conversation between gallerist Carlye Packer and painter Ireland Wisdom, what begins as a reflection on their creative partnership unfolds into a meditation on intimacy, eroticism, play, and mortality. Wisdom, whose portraits are painted from live models in prolonged silence are charged with a psychic intensity. She speaks with Packer candidly about her relationship to the body, desire, and the mythic tradition of being seen—and of seeing. As they revisit their early collaborations and look closer at Wisdom’s new Dance Macabre series, the dialogue dances between the sacred and the scandalous, from Goya to Dorian Gray to Georges Bataille. As friends and colleagues, they muse about works that are made like someone chasing the moment before it is lost. Whether you are a sitter or simply a viewer, you are invited to enter that entanglement with her. Read more.

Tom Wesselmann "A Different Kind of Woman" @ Almine Rech Gallery In Paris

In October 2016, Almine Rech Gallery will host an exhibition of historical artworks by Tom Wesselmann, inspired by the artist’s 1970 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Wesselmann’s ‘Bedroom Tit Box’, a key performative work from the Janis exhibition, will be restaged in Paris for the first time. The work will be installed alongside seminal examples of Wesselmann’s post-collage works, making the exhibition at Almine Rech the most significant presentation of the artist’s work in Paris since his 1995 retrospective at the Fondation Cartier, and groundbreaking 1967 exhibition at Ileana Sonnabend Gallery. Tom Wesselmann "A Different Kind of Woman"  will be on view until December 21, 2016 at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris. photographs by Mazzy-Mae Green

TOM of FINLAND Original Drawings

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Tom of Finland’s real name is Touko – because he was born on 8 May 1920, on the south coast of Finland, and May in Finnish is “Toukokuu”. His homeland had been independent for just three years when Touko was born, and outside its few cities the country was still rough and wild. The men who worked in the fields and woods, the farmers and loggers, were true frontiersmen, every bit as rough and wild as the countryside. Touko grew up among those men but was not a part of their world. Both his parents were schoolteachers, and they raised Touko indoors in an atmosphere of art, literature and music. Obviously talented, by the time he was five he was playing the piano and drawing comic strips. He loved art, literature and music. But he loved those outdoorsmen even more. At that same age of five, Touko began to spy on a neighbour, a muscular, stomping farmboy whose name, “Urho”, means “hero”. Urho was the first in a long line of heroes to hold Tom’s attention while he memorized every flex of their lean muscles, every humorous twist of their full lips. In 1939, Touko went to art school in Helsinki to study advertising. His fascination expanded to include the sexy city types he found in that cosmopolitan port – construction workers, sailors, policemen – but he never dared proposition them. It was not until Stalin invaded Finland and Tom was drafted into a lieutenant’s uniform that he found nirvana in the blackouts of World War II. At last, in the streets of the pitch-black city, he began to have the sex he had dreamed of with the uniformed men he lusted after, especially once the German soldiers had arrived in their irresistible jackboots. TOM of FINLAND  Original Drawings now on view at the PHD Gallery in St. Louis, Missouri until August 6. more...

Lust and Vice

Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller: Danaë och guldregnet. NM 1767

Danaë and the Shower of Gold, Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller, 1786

The exhibition Lust & Vice shows examples of how sexuality, virtue and sin have been depicted in art since the 16th century – from an age when the Church preached that sexual contact was only permitted within wedlock to today’s questioning of who erotic art is created for. A total of 200 works are on show from the museum’s own collections, a mix of paintings, drawings, sculptures and applied art. You can also see a genuine chastity belt! Now on view at the National Gallery in Stockholm 24 March 2011–14 August 2011. www.nationalmuseum.se