How the Queer Body is Represented in Art
The male nude is one of the oldest artistic fixations: The Riace bronzes, Greek sculptures cast around 450 B.C., depict naked, bearded warriors as exemplars of masculine strength and beauty; “Farnese Hercules,” a third-century B.C. marble sculpture of the mythical hero, once stood at Rome’s Baths of Caracalla. Over the next 2,000 years, capturing the naked male form became an essential artistic skill, one that reached its apotheosis in Western culture during the Italian Renaissance, when homosexual desire was subtly expressed in Donatello’s bronze “David” (circa 1440) and Caravaggio’s painting “The Musicians” (1597), wherein the traditional female muse is replaced with a band of boys, partially robed in togas, referencing a Greek and Roman period in which homoerotica was a part of society. The artist was playing “a little erotic game,” says the retired N.Y.U. classics professor Andrew Lear, 59, who now runs Oscar Wilde Tours, a company that offers excursions focused on implicitly gay art and history in major museums.
Marcelo Amorim, ‘Untitled 3’ (Big Arms), 2014 - oil on canvas - 140 x 100 cm - £ 5500
But while some old masters fetishized the male body in barely coded ways, the idea of an openly gay artist expressing his desires from a queer perspective was only born in the last century. Since then, gay perspectives on the male body found their way into visual culture, though they’ve typically been considered taboo or hypersexual, or even vaguely pornographic. However at Arrière-Garde, we think that art is the ultimate expression of freedom, liberation and a powerful tool for counterculture, and our Brazilian artist Marcelo Amorim and his work prove our stance. We are proud to sell gay art online, and to offer queer collectors a way of expressing themselves and their way of life through the art they buy.
Marcelo Amorim, ‘Untitled’ (Dusk), 2018 - oil on canvas - 60 x 60 cm - £ 2250
Marcelo Amorim: Male Bodies
Marcelo Amorim’s art screams: Feel free to think of your body as a legitimate source of desire!
In his artworks, the connection between Queer mind, body and community shows up in very direct ways. This artist creates a narrative on how ideas about the body are formed by messages from culture, counterculture, and society.
Marcelo Amorim is a Brazilian artist and independent curator based in São Paulo. Amorim has held solo exhibitions at the Museum MARP, Ribeirão Preto (2019), has premiered work at the Casa do Brasil, Madrid, Spain (2018), at the CAIXA Cultural Rio de Janeiro (2017), Casa do Brasil, Brussels, Belgium (2017), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, USA (2017), the Solar Santo Antônio Arts Gallery, Porto, Portugal (2015), and at the at Kunst im Kulturflur in Berlin (2011). He was one of the artists nominated for the prestigious 2010 PIPA Prize.
Marcelo Amorim, ‘Untitled 2’ (Show-off), 2018 - oil on canvas - 60 x 60 cm – £ 2250
Find Out About Our Queer Oriented Art Selection: Your Lifestyle, Your Art
Art made of irreverent stances, that embraces the statuesque shape of the Male Body, forges unprecedented aspects of sexuality, and reveals unauthorised desires.
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