Untitled (Angel), 2009, charcoal on mounted paper. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.
Jack Pierson
“Sex has only rarely been a theme in my work and then predominantly in my early years. Beauty, poetry, love—those are my subject matters. Unless maybe voyeurism counts as sex.”
Brian, Costa del Sol, 2009, pigment print. Courtesy of the artist and Cheim & Read, New York.
Marlo Pascual
“Recently, part of my process has been searching for pictures of nude women on eBay, which makes me feel like a pervert . . . but it also led me to the realization that you can pretty much search any word and get an image of a nude woman.”
Untitled, 2009, digital print and rock. Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.
Dean Sameshima
“Sexuality = desire; desire = sexuality. My work always starts with the autobiographical and sexual/homosexual histories—present, past, and mainly the forgotten—as a starting point.”
Avid, curtains #1), 2009, unique polaroid; pig (couch), 2009, black-and-white image on canvas; pig (chandelier #1), 2009, black-and-white image on canvas; Kinbaku-bi (Evan’s arm), 2009, fuji-flex print. Courtesy of the artist and Peres Projects Berlin, Los Angeles.
AIDS-3d (Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas)
“We use sexuality in the same way advertising uses it. It’s not just that sex sells, it’s that it is a good universal vessel for embedded messages. It doesn’t matter whether it’s ‘Buy our ice cream’ or ‘Think critically about the future of humanity.’”
Magnitude, 2009, digital stills from a 14-day-long site-specific animation for Yama, Istanbul.
Aurel Schmidt
“Sexuality is the godhead of my practice: Think about sex; have sex; make art about sex. Fall in love; make art about love. dig up repressed sexual issues; have sex in the face of these issues. Make art about it. Make babies; make art about babies . . . ’til infinity.”
Heaven is a Place on Earth, 2009, pencil, colored pencil, acrylic, and cum on paper. Special thanks: Lucien Marc Smith.
Elad Lassry
“Art constantly expands my ideas of what is sexy, which is a highly flexible thing to begin with.”
Papayas, 2009, C-type print. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
Nobuyoshi Araki
“Women become sexy when they are bound.”
Shino, 2009, RP Direct Print. Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery.
Francesco Vezzoli
“I like having sex after I am done with a needlework. It feels like when you were in high school and you would jerk off late at night after you were finally done with all the translations from Latin and Greek literature.”
Champagne, 2009, laser print on canvas with metallic embroidery. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery.
Paul P.
“I have been reading the short stories of Tennessee Williams. Often their gruesomeness coexists with a fablelike quality. ‘When desire lives constantly with fear, and no partition between them, desire must become very tricky; it has to become as sly as the adversary.’”
Untitled, 2009, colored pencil on paer. Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Reich Gallery. Excerpt from the story “Desire and the Black Masseur,” 1948.
Linder
“I always use images from magazines from the formative years of my sexuality. There’s still something there that has to be forever cut up, rearranged, and glued down until it finally makes sense. . . .”
Siren, 2008, collage. Courtesy of the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. Photo: Todd-White & Son, London.
