King Dogs Never Grow Old: A Group Show Curated By Brooke Wise @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles

Borrowed from André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s surrealist text Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), the show’s title alludes to exploring the nonsensical and the dreamlike unconscious. The work on view shares a common dialogue and aims to explore these surrealist notions in a contemporary manner.

Jillian Mayer and Haley Josephs use color and whimsy to address these surrealist concepts. Ginny Casey draws inspiration from classic Walt Disney cartoons and welcomes the spectator with distorted, absurd and disproportioned objects, which play with our restrictions of logic and time. Tom of Finland celebrates sexuality, fantasy, and the body in all areas of human endeavor. Scott Reeder and Matthew Sweesy both use comedy and rhetoric in their paintings. Chris Wolston’s Nalgona chairs are humanized by his addition of wicker body parts. Sam Crow’s tufted wall works skew our sense of reality and attempt to destroy our sense of stability in her usage of geometric shapes and dimension. Rose Nestler’s soft sculptures explore the body as the subconscious mind. Bri Williams uses found objects often with personal associations, to evoke a potent, psychic mood. Minimalist artist Robert Moreland reinvents his canvas into the space between painting and sculpture, while Haley Mellin’s small paintings reinvent mundane objects such as a Warholian banana floating in space. Through comedy, rhetoric, sarcasm and the uncanny, these works all share a common discourse about surrealism, the unexpected and the unconventional.

King Dogs Never Grow Old is on view through February 1st at Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Rick Castro “Fetish King: Seminal Photographs 1986 – 2019” Opening At Tom House In Los Angeles

The artist’s sex positive imagery is darkly erotic, elegant, and at times, sinister. A powerful and imaginative figure that emerged in the Los Angeles underground during the late ’80s, His photographs are characterized by potent and visceral tableaux, tinged with sadomasochism, leather and sexual pleasure. From the artist’s fetishizing of Tony Ward in the ’80s, to capturing moments, places and the people of the underground scene in Los Angeles nightlife in the ’90s and ’00s, he continues his pictorial career and fascination with lust, desire and kink producing elegant portraiture of celebrated artists and the demi-monde. The exhibition will be on view until April 27 by appointment at Tom House in Los Angeles. Read a conversation between Rick Castro and Rick Owens in our Spring 2019 issue. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper.

Preview of Secret Gay Box Curated by John Wolf at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles

John Wolf Fine Art presents Secret Gay Box with Tom of Finland Foundation. Wolf was raised in an Evangelical Christian home where Homosexuality was viewed as a sin and flaw, and consequently as a child he kept a secret box from his parents. The ability to have a private world, and to collect, is ultimately what led Wolf to art world. Secret Gay Box features over fifteen artists who have navigated their sexuality through artistic expression. Like Wolf’s childhood box, this space will be one where art hides in plain sight, even where people might not think to look. The space itself as well as the artworks in it embrace the creativity that it can take to effectively conceal oneself, but also the beauty that can occur in freedom from whatever ‘box’ one might have. All humans have their own “secret gay box”, either conscious or subconscious. This show, the artists represented, and the act of creating a personal art collection are a way to simultaneously fill the box or open it for those around you. Secret Gay Box will be on view until November 17, 2018 at the Tom Of Finland Foundation, 1421 Laveta Terrace, Los Angeles, CA 90026. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

A Peek Inside The New "Tom House: Tom of Finland in Los Angeles" Book

Tom House: Tom of Finland in Los Angeles, from the Rizzoli imprint, is a delicious peek inside the legendary former residence of Finnish erotic illustrator and painter of all your gay fantasies, Touko Laaksonen. The home, on a quiet suburban street in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, is where Laaksonen, most famously known as Tom of Finland, lived and worked during the last ten years of his life. The men and muses he lived with still live there to this day and maintain the home just as he left it, albeit with a lot more of his artwork on the walls. To the un-gay eye, this house may seem like a den of iniquity, but in reality it is a shrine to the late Tom of Finland and it is a testament to freedom of sexuality and desire. Straight or gay, Tom’s House is a must visit when you spend time in Los Angeles, and the book is an excellent way to visit if you can’t actually be there. All in all, the book is also one of the best testaments to the legacy of Tom of Finland.  Click here to purchase Tom House: Tom of Finland In Los Angeles.

Highlights From The Tom of Finland Art and Culture Festival 2015 In Los Angeles

The Tom of Finland Foundation hosted the Tom of Finland Art + Culture festival at TOM House in Echo Park, Los Angeles. This year's festival featured more than 30 artists, both emerging and established. The weekend showcased live performance, poetry readings, short films, and erotic art spanning sculpture, photography, paintings, sketches, digital renderings, and more. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Go See Tom of Finland's Comprehensive Retrospective at Artists Space in New York

"The Pleasure of Play" is the most comprehensive Tom of Finland survey exhibition to date, including more than 190 drawings, gouaches from the 1940s, over 300 pages of collages, as well as early childhood work. Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen; Finnish; 1920, Kaarina – 1991, Helsinki), is considered to be the most iconic gay artist of the 20th century. 25 years after his death, the wide-reaching cultural impact of his work, in comparison to his global status, has only been infrequently presented, examined or discussed. Go see "The Pleasure of Play" at Artists Space until August 23, 2015 at Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, New York City. Click here to see our tour of the Tom of Finland Foundation. 

[TOUR] Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles

Located in the quaint and cozy back streets of Echo Park in Los Angeles, the Tom of Finland Foundation is not so much a gay mecca as it is a mecca of sexuality and a celebration of desire. The house – an early craftsman built in 1910 – was purchased by Durk Dehner in the late 70s. After Durk met Touko Laaksonen (aka Tom of Finland), the house became their sanctuary and the attic became Touko’s private studio. The house also became a safe haven for art with homosexual overtones when AIDS was painted as a gay disease. Today, the home is full of Tom of Finland’s distinctive black and white illustrations of buxom men with their muscles glistening and members bulging. Even though Tom of Finland died a little more than twenty years ago, his room is virtually the same – with his boots propped up and a smudge of ash still in the ashtray. We were fortunate to be given a tour of the foundation by its vice-president and curator S.R. Sharp who took us on an extensive journey that started with the entry drawing room and ended in the backyard – dubbed Pleasure Park – where palm trees swayed and Los Angeles sparkled under a crepuscular sky. Text and photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

40 Years of Camp

Ken Weaver, AB Astra Lumina (To the Stars Light), 2007, Oil pastel on paper, two panels

Opening today, Schroeder Romero in New York presents the exhibition Summer Camp featuring James Bidgood, Brice Brown, Tom of Finland, Scott Hunt, Heather Johnson, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Cary Leibowitz/Candyass, Jean Lowe, Robert Mapplethorpe, Uzi Parnes, Carl Plansky, John Waters, and Ken Weaver representing over forty years of work about and within ‘camp’ culture and aesthetic—an aesthetic, according to Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (1964), focused on artifice, frivolity, naïve middle-class pretentiousness, and ‘shocking’ excess. Summer Camp will be on view from June 7 to August 12, 2012 at Schroeder Romero, 531 West 26th Street New York NY

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...