2019 - Fox Jensen Gallery

NOVEMBER – GEOFF THORNLEY – AUCKLAND

foxjensen — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 02:07:43 +0000

Geoff Thornley’s painting practice is unquestionably one of the most considered and refined in New Zealand. Few painters have pursued abstraction so resolutely, resisting the fashion for appropriation and pastiche – the convenient cultural and stylistic diversions so often favoured by commentators. His clarity and conviction serve to guide discussions about his work back to painting itself and to its lineage.

In looking back over almost fifty years there are deep aesthetic strata connecting his painting, from the mid-seventies when Thornley represented New Zealand at the São Paulo Biennale through to his newest Anterior & History works. There is a composed lyricism and quiet material finesse across most all of his series, and certainly in the newest paintings there is a more open expression of gesture and material re-emerging that harks back to his early paintings.

In his exhibition opening at Fox Jensen McCrory in November there is a softer organicism to the colour that opens the face of the paintings, allowing us to see into and through the structure he has built. It is always the case with Thornley that this interior framework emerges slowly. Shifts in light invite the anatomy of the painting to be partially exposed in a slow, demure dance that both reveals and obscures simultaneously. This courtship between viewer and object is measured by the customary restraint and discipline that characterise Thornley’s painting. He seems determined to remind us that making a painting is about an incremental building of form and presence – about giving body to colour and light, as only painting can do. However this reciprocation takes time and commitment in the viewing as it does in the making.

As is always the case with Thornley there are a multitude of considerations that are critical to the paintings eventual form. His final re-positioning of the canvas on its completed stretcher, the relationship between margin and edge, the fineness of the stretcher face and the depth of the support. These adjustments feel critical to our apprehension and perception of the work and for Thornley they acknowledge another aspect about making that marries function and ceremony.

Geoff Thornley’s Devonport studio approaches a Shaker-like modesty but there is nothing self-conscious about it. The wooden stairs to the first-floor painting space are worn, the timber floor is cleaner than one might imagine, the two chairs are effective but not cosy. However any sense of austerity subsides the second you see his painting. For though the studio is organised so as to allow for thinking and making, the paintings are where he locates his feelings and intuitions. Spend just a few minutes with them and time and vision slow allowing for, or more accurately facilitating, an overdue sensitivity in us.

Andrew Jensen 2019

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NOVEMBER – JENNY TOPFER – SYDNEY

foxjensen — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 03:49:04 +0000

Graham Greene said of “human nature (that it) is not black and white but black and grey.” Something similar might be said of Jenny Topfer’s white paintings which, like those of Robert Ryman, pretend to be white but are in fact substantiated by a complex morphology of other pigments and structures, of gestures and body.

As tempting as it might be to see their relative whiteness as evidence of distillation, even a cleansing of the burdens of visual fatigue, Topfer’s white, like Ryman’s, allows the painting to be something ‘other’ and though Ryman’s architectonic intent differs significantly from Topfer’s gestural adventure, both choose to operate on a chromatic margin so that as viewers we too might approach seeing, or more particularly perceiving with a heightened sense of nuance and judgement.

The landscape around Jenny’s studio is hardy. Situated high on the Southern Midlands hills the tussock grasses and fence-lines are shaped by wind, the sky has a turbulence and portent that diminishes the tonal bandwidth of the view. Much like its middle eastern namesake Bagdad, the chromatic field of the environment feels narrow, though in Tasmania the palette is less “desert storm” and more closely approximates the moodier green?/grey camouflage of northern Europe.

The notion of a reduced tonal range feels significant for a painter whose work is almost entirely white. Other pigments might well be used initially in the roving, orienteering phase of mark making, but they are essentially obscured by a snowy camouflage, a blanket that mutes the more voluble ferment below. One senses that Jenny prefers whisper over clamour and that the contingencies of communication only stand a chance without the pressure of amplification.

Having said that she seems drawn to the energy and starch required to face into Tasmania’s boisterous elements. Perhaps the adversity sets the climate for painting, primes you for the predicaments of creativity.

Such romanticism could and often does lead to an arranged marriage between gesture and meteorological theatre, as if the brush itself were buffeted by spiritual and blustery forces that the wrist simply couldn’t defy. This is not the case in Topfer’s work however. Her paintings absorb the visceral charge that the climate delivers but alters the current so that the work is infused with a latent vigour, a suppressed fierceness.

Increasingly traces of the preparatory layers remain. At the edges we see shards of colour – bright blues, ochre and black on the raw linen. Evidence of a looping rhythmical gesture implies a more compliant relationship between the oil stick and the surface. However the linen Jenny chooses has tooth and filament to it. It sits up to meet the oil stick, implicating itself in her gesture, asserting its weave and character and demanding real pressure from her touch. This engagement between material and process, labour and time invests her painting with an elegiac burden that as viewers we can sense. There is truthfulness in this and we benefit vicariously by being party to such an exchange.

I started writing about Jenny’s paintings as if she were a landscape painter and of course she is not. Finding analogies in her immediate surrounds is tempting of course but as I have sat and talked with her in the studio, been lucky enough to live around the work for some time now, I am aware of her capacity to make work that draws less on the environment but exists assuredly in a “no-man’s land”. This uneasy nexus between language and understanding can occasionally be filled by painting…good painting – otherwise it’s just more white noise.

– Andrew Jensen

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OCTOBER – WINSTON ROETH – AUCKLAND

foxjensen — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 03:33:49 +0000

In September 2020 paintings by American artist Winston Roeth will be gathered from the corners of the globe to Wiesbaden, Germany. Together they will form a major survey of his highly refined and passionate practice. Fox, Jensen & McCrory will be at the Kunstmuseum to celebrate with Winston – the friend and the painter.

I was introduced to Winston back in 1996. His studio was on a third-floor walk-up in Little Italy, right above the famed Café Roma. It was a bustling and relentlessly noisy neighbourhood in the heart of the Lower East Side and it couldn’t have felt more Manhattan. I was lucky enough to stay there many times on my subsequent visits to NYC, and though Winston has since moved north to the more patient and civilized Hudson Valley, Emma and I often find ourselves walking past Café Roma and looking up at Winston’s old windows – swimming in nostalgia and happy memories.

In the late 90s the apartment was given over almost entirely to ‘the arts’. Winston’s wife, Susan Osberg, was (and still is) a notable choreographer and dancer, and Winston was painting full-time. This devotion to work meant that the zone for entertaining and living was compressed into a humble, shaker-like space that separated studios at either end of the apartment. All the windows were covered in a soft glycine paper which didn’t exactly reduce the hubbub of the city, but it kept much of the visual noise at bay. And that is what Winston has been doing all these years since…keeping visual noise at bay, whilst giving colour the clarity of an exquisitely held note.

Special collectors all around the world have recognized this gift in Winston. There are many discreet collections in Europe, America, Japan, Korea and Australasia where his work is held in depth. It’s that kind of painting – filled with sensuality, whose immersive generosity functions as an antidote to the anxiety and endless clamour that marks so much of this fraught moment in the world.

You can find Roeth’s works in the collections of MoMA, The Albright Knox Museum, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunstmuseum Weisbaden and Benesse House, Naoshima. Alongside these collections there have been site-specific commissions and installations such as that in Sassuolo Italy, where Roeth was commissioned by the Panza Collection to paint eleven permanent works for the Palazzo Ducale.

This will be the ninth solo exhibition that we have made with Winston. His paintings have been central to most of the major projects we have made too – Points of Orientation (2002 & 2013), Farben (2003 & 2014), Lux (2005), Detox (2006), Naked (2010 & 2011), The Architecture of Colour (2012), The Authority of Death (2015 & 2016), Portrait Without a Face (2018) and most recently Permafrost (2019). You could be forgiven for thinking that he is central to what we stand for. We are thrilled to say that he will be present for the opening in Auckland and will also travel on to Sydney.

Andrew Jensen, October 2019

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OCTOBER – MATTHEW ALLEN – SYDNEY

foxjensen — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 01:41:59 +0000

At first glance Matthew Allen’s work has a crispness and clarity, a latent sense of formality about it that one could be forgiven for assuming that technology played a role in its manifestation…and of course it did. Wood, linen, graphite, paint, brush, burnishing tools – all determinedly analogue technologies in a pervasively digital age.

Allen’s measured configurations, much like the sequential forms of Judd, act as containers for an intuitively driven inquiry into the luminescence of material – one where patient attention arouses a sensuality in that matter that in turn engenders a heightened sensitivity in the viewer. The apparently repeated forms avoid any systemic predictability because rather than repeat, each element acts as a deep echo of the other. Like a ‘Chinese whisper’ whose reverberation delivers a new iteration, they are subtley altered by transference and time.

Allen’s polished graphite works don’t wish to be viewed at a distance. They invite us, up close and personal as if we are approaching a mysterious darkened mirror, tarnished by time and resisting reflection. This notion has been reinforced by the intimacy and scale of the objects he made – many works being the size of a small head and shoulders portrait, certainly no more. In this new group of works Allen has not only increased the scale dramatically but he has turned the axis of the work to insinuate a horizon line.

These “landscape” works of Allen’s might be the flattened DNA of the Northern European Lowlands infiltrating his consciousness, but equally there is a meditative ambience akin to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s celebrated Seascapesthat has always been present in Allen’s work. Allowing himself permission to paint the horizon line, it is almost as if he was granting himself permission to look away from the close scrutiny of intimate portraiture…to calm his eyes and mind on the distant horizon…to find oneself through the release of a distant gaze rather than the demands of close quarter inspection.

Untitled, 2019 is the largest of these works. At almost 2 metres in height the work extends beyond the physical height of most viewers (though probably not Matthew). The top band is painted in a beautiful, soft, deep black with the three horizontal bands below each a shimmering meniscus of burnished graphite. Looking up and through the graphite panels towards the darkened horizon line one senses that Allen is looking back beyond Sugimoto to the romanticism of Casper David Friedrich. Friedrich’s Sea Shore in Moonlightcirca 1835-36 with its diffuse evening light, has a sense of serenity and implied confrontation of man against nature.

Whatever the scale of these new paintings and the “macro” implications that such a horizon line implies psychologically, Allen’s work remains an aggregate of “micro” gestures. From the small ceremonies attached to substrate preparation, to the burnishing and polishing of his graphite surfaces these paintings are very much hand-made and understood through our own analogue technologies – eyes and intuition.

Andrew Jensen 2019

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SEPTEMBER – IMI KNOEBEL – AUCKLAND

foxjensen — Sat, 14 Sep 2019 04:30:42 +0000

Imi Knoebel is one of the key members of a generation of German painters who collectively shaped much of the second half of 20th century’s art history. A student of Joseph Beuys at the famed Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, Knoebel along with Blinky Palermo, Imi Giese and Gerhard Richter found early success on both sides of the Atlantic. Today Knoebel is unquestionably one of the most important figures in Europe and his works have been collected by museums throughout the world and by private collectors on every continent. Notable museum collections include DIA: Beacon, MoMA, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, MOCA, Los Angeles, K21 Dusseldorf and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia Madrid. Major touring surveys of his work have been mounted at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Hambuger Bahnhof and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Like his close friend Palermo, Knoebel resisted the orthodoxy and shrewd sentimentality of Richter’s painting, or the narrative loading of Anselm Keifer. Instead his work prefers an architectonic robustness that speaks as much to Judd as to Matisse – and whilst colour remains the abiding fascination for Knoebel, it is the manner in which he constructs elaborate supports, both in wood and aluminium, the dimensional expanse and folded morphology of the structure that has set Knoebel aside.

Reims Cathedral. This extraordinary work in his signature red, yellow and blue was unveiled in 2011, on the occasion of the 800th anniversary of the cathedral’s existence. One hundred years after the start of WWI, a further three windows were unveiled. The artist refused payment for both commissions, seeing his time, skills and labour and that of the Knoebel studio, as a personal contribution to German/French reparations.

Fox Jensen has been privileged to work quietly with Imi Knoebel since 2000, exhibiting both paintings and works on paper. We are thrilled to be once again presenting major paintings from multiple series, including the heroic Cut-Up works through to the intimacy of the Anima Mundi “portraits” and the newest series of shaped aluminium paintings seductively titled Big Girls.

Andrew Jensen, September 2019

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SEPTEMBER – PERMAFROST – SYDNEY

foxjensen — Fri, 13 Sep 2019 03:47:41 +0000

Permafrost an offsite exhibition at 68 -70 Burrows Road Alexandria

Lawrence Carroll
Winston Roeth
Aida Tomescu
Jenny Topfer
Geoff Thornley
Boomoon
Tomislav Nikolic
Liat Yossifor
Callum Innes
Kemal Seyhan
Hanns Kunitzberger
Struan Teague

Permafrost brings together artists from Europe, USA and Australasia. For the first time in Australia, the gallery will stage a major exhibition in a stunning private exhibition space in Alexandria, Sydney. And also for the first time we will present works by new gallery artists Lawrence Carroll (USA), Liat Yossifor (USA), Hanns Kunitzberger (AUT), Kemal Seyhan (TUR) and Boomoon (KOR), alongside young British painter Struan Teague and artists familiar to the gallery’s program, Aida Tomescu (AUS), Tomislav Nikolic (AUS), Winston Roeth (USA), Geoff Thornley (NZ), Callum Innes (UK) and Jenny Topfer (AUS).

Many of the works are major in scale and ambition and despite their highly individual characters, share a mysterious double life. Between the rigour and authenticity of their making all of these works are profoundly metaphorical. They both conceal and reveal aspects of their material life and making but each transcend the recent fashion for “process”. Their collective whole is far, far greater than the sum of their parts and each work demonstrates how painting, more than any medium continues to enfold vision and tactility with poetry.

The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Australian born artist Lawrence Carroll. Lawrence sustained a major career on either side of the Atlantic having moved to America as a child and his work has been presented and collected by museums worldwide. Lawrence sadly passed away on May 21st this year.

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SEPTEMBER – AIDA TOMESCU – SYDNEY

foxjensen — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 00:31:11 +0000

Walking into Aida Tomescu’s new studio earlier this week, it was clear she has now colonised every corner. The cacti are doing well situated at the new northern window, there is a comfortable sofa and a CD player with Mahler on repeat. Scented candles work hard to curb the chemistry of oil paint – but primarily this space is an engine for working and that is exactly what she has been doing. As Aida shifted weighty canvases from one side of the studio to the other, each considerably larger than she, the ambition and scale of her endeavours was clearly evident.

This new exhibition The Open Wounds of White Clouds comes at a time when Aida herself suggests that she hadn’t felt this energised and productive in more than a decade. Though she may have painted herself to a standstill one can sense that the excitement of what she has been able to produce for this exhibition will continue to evolve and induce more powerful work.

All the paintings in this exhibition are dramatic and forceful – colour is corporeal, gesture is authoritative. These qualities are given most latitude where the scale allows maximum opportunity for the cadence and command to amplify. Sewn onto Stones in the Sky is an epically scaled triptych, the largest painting Tomescu has ever made and follows a clutch of diptychs painted since 2017 that initiated this new expansiveness. The triptych has a grand musical action about it. A series of forceful passages build tone and density across the breadth of its score. Each panel confers with the others in a composition that has both delicacy and power. Layers of colour and gesture collude in an unexpected collage that sustains the intensity of the rich magenta crescendos.

Other paintings in this new group such as Into the Folds Of White and Folded Into The White Of My Words I & II remind us again how much Tomescu’s gesture is grounded in drawing and excavation. Her angular calligraphy ducks in and out of the broader brushstrokes of white, its legibility abandoned long ago.

Tomescu’s script act’s as a metaphor for a rapport, a fundamental mark making that is axiomatic, beyond dialect and tongue, its communicative weight rests on the dismantling of language. Tomescu unfastens painting from depiction so that the reconstruction of form is unfettered by illusion. Seldom do we see painting that is sufficiently brave as to disentangle itself from the comfort of what we know and determinedly pose what we fear.

Andrew Jensen, September 2019

THE OPEN WOUNDS OF WHITE CLOUDS CATALOGUE 2019.pdf

THE OPEN WOUNDS OF WHITE CLOUDS INSTALLATION VIEW FOX JENSEN SYDNEY 2019

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AUGUST – TOMISLAV NIKOLIC – AUCKLAND

foxjensen — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 03:47:15 +0000

Fox Jensen McCrory is delighted to announce an exhibition of new works by Tomislav Nikolic. It is the ninth solo exhibition held with the galleries.

This new group of works “pay the prophets to justify your reason” continues Nikolic’s engagement with art historical exemplars. Most often his own works are heartfelt responses to artworks that move him especially. Reaching back as far as adolescence, Nikolic recalls the power of seeing paintings by Francis Bacon – the colour, the scale, and the confronting narratives offered him an experience that whilst public, also felt deeply personal, an involvement that couldn’t be had elsewhere, other than with painting.

There is a larger group of seven individual, discreet works, that respond less to the particularities of respective works but to the broader communicative power and symbolism that paintings have maintained for centuries as votive objects. In Kasmir Malevich’s 0-10 exhibition in 1915-16 the artist chose to place the seminal Black Square painting high in the corner of the room in the privileged position of the household icon painting. Elevated and transcendent, Malevich’s famous painting was immediately loaded with content and responsibility. These seven new works, each painted on wooden panels and fastened into their steel frames in a clear, prosaic way, celebrate colour and its emotive power more than religiosity. Like a medieval icon painting, the wood itself is ever so gently convex and will in time invite fissures to appear, most likely at the edges – its stubborn organic life still evident.

A second suite of seven works is in fact one piece. Using Nikolic’s more familiar extravagant frames which are fully co-opted into the structure, composition and rainbow of colour, this group of works makes the dictum: “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts” wildly evident. Subtle shifts in scale, together with audacious juxtapositions of colour and intensity gives this work a musical quality. More be-bop than symphonic, your eye moves back and forth along its length propelled by its chromatic pulse and whimsy in a kaleidoscopic approximation of Charlie Parker’s Ornithology.

Nikolic continues to evolve as one of the most compelling painters of his generation. His work has been collected all over the world, due to its ability to expand the communicative role that painting can have. Further than this Nikolic understands the historical, theoretical and symbolic responsibility that colour itself can shoulder.

Andrew Jensen, August 2019

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JULY – TONY OURSLER – SYDNEY

foxjensen — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 05:03:24 +0000

If Picasso had a digital camera….

The cubist dissection of the face and its radical reassembly along the flattened planes of the canvas opened the way for a new psychological intrusion into the psyche of the sitter. Picasso’s painting of Dora Maar, Buste de femme at chapeau (Dora) 1939 * with its kooky facial architecture, manages to reveal more of the sitters character than the most fastidious realism could possibly account for. And whilst Oursler’s work, with all of its theatre, humour and domestic voyuerism may seem a mile away from Picasso, Oursler’s extraordinary digital sculptures owe much to painting.

However it is Oursler’s ability to implicate the audience in the unfolding drama that so heightens our experience of the work. We are not viewing the work in a binary exchange between object and viewer but are made complicit in his poignant, human and occasionally unsavoury dramas.

As we do with Picasso, we forgive the reconstruction and become seduced by the admonitions, the pleading humanity, the brilliantly engaging babble filled with insight and lunacy, comedy and tragedy.

Fox Jensen is thrilled to present two emblematic works by Oursler. Blue is one of a small group of works made in 2006. It is a sister work to Blue You that is currently on loan to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and this work shares its completely involving and compelling character.

On/Off is one of Oursler’s most distilled and extraordinary works. His talking light bulbs have been installed in museums and cities all over the world and show his capacity as a writer, performer and magician. The monologue touches on issues of surveillance and privacy, It is equal part Orwellian and Trumpian in its timely examination of data manipulation and unseen threats.

– Andrew Jensen, 2019

* Collection Foundation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland

Museum and Public Collections:
Eli Broad Family Foundaton, Los Angeles
capc Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Cartier Foundation, Paris
Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio
Depont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa
Goetz Collection, Munich
Hara Museum, Tokyo, Japan
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
JB Speed Museum, Louisville, Kentucky
Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
Magasin 3, Stockholm
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal
Musée d’Art Contemporain, Barcelona
Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon
Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California
Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Museum of Osaka, Japan
Orange County Museum of Art, California
Saatchi Collection, London
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich
Tate Gallery, London
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
ZMK/Center for Art & Media, Karlsruhe, Germany
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts

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JULY – EROS – AUCKLAND

foxjensen — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 04:45:31 +0000

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
Anais Nin

…Or as we secretly want to be…treated, viewed, touched, adored, violated, loved, fucked, kissed, held, worshipped, degraded, caressed, seduced, hurt, restrained, entered, torn apart, made whole again.

Secluded in the bottom drawer or high up in the closet under the winter trilby there may have been a cache of “visual material” in many apparently bashful households. Those blessed with guardians whose clandestine stack of erotica was easily discoverable, felt highly exotic and fortunate, particularly when compared to the neck to ankle modesty that many of us endured.

It was the study of Art History that set me free, just prior to the discovery of Henry Millar and Anais Nin, though Xavier Hollander and Pauline Réage’s The Story of O helped in the earlier, more discombobulating years. Michelangelo’s Dying Slave and Courbet’s Origin of the World offered a candid introduction to the sweep and sensuality, folds and lustre, of both the male and female body. But I think perhaps it was my brush with Nabokov and the paintings of Balthus that first enfolded eroticism with a psychological and aesthetic complexity that was, and still is, provoking and disquieting in equal measure.

This small exhibition doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a curious collection of evidence that we are and always have been surrounded by beautiful, dark, joyous, covert and occasionally unmasked eroticism. That this everyday eroticism gives force and poignancy to our existence, bliss to our temporary animation, and surprisingly regular highlights to the sometimes dry narratives of AH101.

What is clear from this slice of Eros is the range and distinctiveness of how we approach the erotic. From Gideon Rubin’s (IL) undemonstrative and highly sensitive paintings that are tuned to a more “domestic” eroticism; to Hayv Kahraman’s (USA) loaded compositions that conflate cultural and art historical references with a deeply personal self-examination; to Aiko Robinson’s (NZ) contemporary resuscitation of Japanese “shunga” pornography. For all of these artists there is lengthy precedent for the conceptual basis for their work but they bring idiosyncrasy and freshness to the aesthetics of Eros.

Hoda Afshar’s (AUS) suite of photographs Behold offer an intimate view into a concealed world where tenderness rubs up against illegality, where sexuality is necessarily covert, not because some audiences might feel the need to claim protection but the protagonists depend on it.

Tracey Snelling’s (USA) humorous but confronting dioramas are exposés of strip-tease at the strip-mall. The collision of uptight Christian morality going head-to-head with those giving head declares the extent of the cultural discord. Oddly both venues welcome you with open arms and promise to deliver ecstasy.

Alongside these works are extraordinary paintings by Tomislav Nikolic (AUS), Eric Fischl (USA), Jane Bustin (UK) and Frank Kenis (BEL) each of whom attend to notions of the sensual and the erotic – from Bustin’s and Nikolic’s distilled poetic symbolism to Fischl’s and Kenis’s forceful painterly explicitness.

It is this tension between public and private, between extroverted and cloistered that goes to the heart of the Eros dilemma. The confusion about morality, sexual orthodoxy and pleasure feels so extreme at this moment, the moral and political compass spinning so wildly out of kilter, yet surely it is the repugnance of so called “moral judgement” that is more terrifying than the evidence of some consensual fucking.

The museological objects in this exhibition make it clear that before the avalanche of jpegs and gifs traded on the internet and the growth of the porn film industry, there was room for a kind of “everyday eroticism”, be it in the form of a finely painted vase, a precocious pot handle or an exquisitely carved marble fountain. Whether such sexual candour displayed on your pots and fountains, brought the bedroom into the kitchen or backyard, was evidence of the imminent fall of Rome, is far less interesting than the ubiquity of the erotic life that all cultures recognise, and some chose to dignify.

Andrew Jensen, May 2019

EROS DIGITAL CATALOGUE

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