Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar masterfully couples melodrama with equally intense visuals. Across his extensive filmography, twisting plots full of sex and violence coalesce with high-contrast sets and vibrant costumes. A woman in a red sweater holds a knife covered in her husband’s blood (Volver, 2006). A man in a tiger suit binds and rapes a woman in a bourgeois home (The Skin I Live In, 2011). A vengeful drag queen performs in a sequined dress adorned with fake pubic hair (Bad Education, 2004).
Such images help elevate Almodóvar’s soap opera–worthy material into high art. If interpersonal scandal is usually at the heart of his films, it’s often paired with larger societal issues, from the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War to sexual abuse within families or the Catholic Church. Expansive ideas about gender and sexuality are often central to his work.
The following artists are similarly bold in their visual imaginings. They rethink subjects as wide-ranging as geometry, aliens, and fashion editorials through a queer lens as they create works that alternately glimmer, seduce, and repel.
Martine Gutierrez
B. 1989, Berkeley, California. Lives and works in New York.
Known for: centering the trans and Indigenous self in fashion-inspired photography
Masking, Green-Grape Mask, p51 from Indigenous Woman, 2018
Martine Gutierrez
RYAN LEE
Demons, Chin 'Demon of Lust,' p93 from Indigenous Woman, 2018
Martine Gutierrez
RYAN LEE
Martine Gutierrez repurposes the visual language of advertising and editorials to tell new stories about gender and indigeneity. The trans artist casts herself in glossy images that look torn from a fashion magazine; in various series, she may pose with a doll, or pretend to be one herself. In her series “Indigenous Woman” (2018), the artist wears outfits and headdresses that reference her Mayan heritage. Other images mock self-care culture, featuring a model with oysters, eggs, or enormous kiwis over her eyes, and grapes or fish in place of a necklace.
Throughout all this work, Gutierrez uses humor and surreal glamour to undermine our entrenched notions of beauty. Her work encourages us to look more closely at the images made to stimulate our desires, and what their objectification has to do with gender and race.
Gutierrez stretches the boundaries of fashion and beauty as she reconceives the larger sociopolitical forces that make a fashion icon. Throughout his own career, Almódovar has worked with actresses who aren’t traditional Hollywood types. His leading ladies have ranged from Tilda Swinton and Rossy de Palma to more conventional beauties like Penelope Cruz, and he’s given meaty roles to actresses at middle age, including Julieta Serrano and Marisa Paredes.
Salman Toor
B. 1983, Lahore. Lives and works in New York.
Known for: dreamy, art history–inspired paintings of queer men of color
Three Boys, 2019
Salman Toor
Anat Ebgi
The Texter, 2019
Salman Toor
Anat Ebgi
Taking cues from the Impressionists and his Pakistani forebears, Salman Toor paints contemporary queer flaneurs who text, eat takeout, lounge in bed, huddle in a cab, or dance—and always look good doing it. Their lithe figures and draping clothing (when they’re wearing any) suggest la vie bohème. Toor’s thin, supple brushstrokes mirror this loose elegance, and he often bathes his scenes in vivid green or golden light.
That’s not to say that all is copacetic in Toor’s vision of contemporary life. The artist has painted airport scenes that depict the anxieties experienced by men of color trying to pass through security. Other works feature a man getting beaten and one getting captured, indicating that all is still not safe for the community he so vividly renders. Yet love is much more prominent than fear: Toor’s work exudes adoration for the Eastern and Western artworks that inspire him, and for the men who adore and rally around each other.
As Toor creates a sense of intimate community throughout his paintings, so too does Almodóvar emphasize kinship—though the director’s portraits are often of women, in families and small towns, who band together for both gossip and support.
Juliana Huxtable
B. 1987, Bryan-College Station, Texas. Lives and works in New York.
Known for: futuristic prints and portraits that rupture gender binaries
Untitled (Psychosocial Stuntin'), 2015
Juliana Huxtable
New Museum
Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm), 2015
Juliana Huxtable
New Museum
Over the past decade, Juliana Huxtable—a fixture of New York’s downtown scene—has worked as a DJ, published a couple of books, and advocated for LGBTQIA+ rights. Her visual art practice, meanwhile, has yielded prints that look like unusual tabloid headlines (“‘BIO-GOTH’ BODY MOD UNHINGED: EXPERIMENTAL SURGERIES TURN YOUTH INTO MUTANT CREATURES OF THE NIGHT”) and a series of colorful self-portraits in which the artist conceives of herself as a reptilian, genderqueer princess.
The artist was born intersex and raised male, and her vibrant, highly stylized photographs present an identity of her very own making. Part fashion icon, part extraterrestrial, she suggests how we might move forward in the digital age, as we are increasingly represented by self-invented online avatars.
While Almodóvar’s films are more earthbound, the director veered into technofuturistic thinking with The Skin I Live In, in which a doctor creates an artificial skin and performs illegal transgenic experiments. Here, as in Huxtable’s work, the body is a mutable site ready for bold new realities.
Raúl de Nieves
B. 1983, Morelia, Mexico. Lives and works in New York.
Known for: vibrant, bead-encrusted sculptures and stained glass windows
Day, 2016
Raúl de Nieves
Palazzo Monti
One One Eight Four Five Time Is On My Side, 2023
Raúl de Nieves
Hauser & Wirth
Plastic beads are Raúl de Nieves’s primary material. The artist transforms the humble crafting staple into opulent, textured sculptures and installations that are nearly ecclesiastical in their grandeur. In De Nieves’s work, humanoid and animal forms become colorful totems that exuberantly play on the pageantry of Catholic iconography. De Nieves amplifies that sense of the sacred when he pairs the work with stained glass windows featuring figures and words that propose modern-day parables.
De Nieves’s aesthetic derives in part from his Catholic upbringing—an experience shared by Almodóvar, whose work is similarly influenced by it—and his family’s early lessons in craft. Queer culture and nightlife are also key to his practice, and the artist has long performed in an underground band called Hairbone. Almodóvar, too, had his punk rock days: As half of the musical duo Almodóvar & McNamara, he performed in Spain and met collaborators like de Palma, who had her own musical act.
Ad Minoliti
B. 1980, Buenos Aires. Lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Known for: colorful, queer geometric paintings and installations
Teteritas, 2021
Ad Minoliti
Artscapy
Argentine artist Ad Minoliti reworks geometric painting traditions from Latin America. They believe that by working in between figuration and abstraction, they promote tolerance: The viewer’s eye may latch onto recognizable elements in these works, yet the larger forms are unexpected, encouraging comfort with the unfamiliar and ambiguous. This rejection of clear delineations chimes with queer refusal of fixed identity categories.
In one recent painting, for example, an eye appears amid a solid green and brown mass with jutting curves and angles. The work is titled Frog (2022), suggesting a shapeshifting amphibian. The work reconsiders what we mean when we say “frog,” and what the visual essence of a frog really is. Such interest in signs and iconography pervades Minoliti’s oeuvre. Almodóvar is similarly invested in revisiting symbols and archetypes, from the church, to the graveyard, to the mother, to the matador.
Another facet of Minoliti’s practice is their digital collages, made at the outset of their career. These works united geometric and domestic forms—a motif that still lingers in their mature work—to disrupt the gendered connotations of each. For Almodóvar, too, domestic space is potent: His bold interiors can suggest the roiling inner states of his characters.
Bjarne Melgaard
B. 1967, Sydney. Lives and works in Oslo.
Known for: exuberant artwork that embraces seediness and bad taste
Untitled, 2015
Bjarne Melgaard
Faurschou Foundation
Untitled, 2023
Bjarne Melgaard
Keteleer Gallery
Bjarne Melgaard gleefully blows by the boundaries of good taste. The artist paints wild, expressionistic compositions that often feature animals and penises. Among his more outrageous works are a giant sculpture of a multi-colored Pink Panther, pipe in hand, and a 2023 series of drawings that dramatized the sordid story of disgraced art dealer Mary Boone. A larger-than-life sensibility emerges from all this work. Like Almodóvar, whose own melodramas and packed plots stretch the limits of serious film, Melgaard pushes our ideas of what’s acceptable for the gallery space.
Pilar Albarracin
B. 1968, Seville, Spain. Lives and works in Seville and Madrid.
Known for: multidisciplinary feminist work that undermines stereotypes
Untitled, 2018
Pilar Albarracin
Galeria Filomena Soares
Fandango por venas y arterias, 2017
Pilar Albarracin
Fleiss Vallois
Lauded Andalusian artist Pilar Albarracin upends the gender politics involved in Spain’s most famous—and famously stereotyped—cultural offerings, from flamenco to bullfighting. Throughout her photographs and performances, the artist casts herself in various roles: a gypsy, dancer, bullfighter, housewife, and more. Her practice evokes the work of Cindy Sherman, with a national specificity and an activist sensibility. Albarracin, like Almodóvar, often explores violence against women. In her film Untitled (Blood in the Street) (1992) Albarracin, made up to look brutalized, posed in sites around Spain where women had been harmed.
The multidisciplinary artist has also made wall-hung “mandalas” out of women’s underwear, solicited from friends and acquaintances. Albarracin is interested in the relationships between women, and her request for undergarments elicited stories of shame, shyness, and excitement that connected her more closely with her female social circle. Women’s complex entanglements are similarly at the center of Almodóvar’s films. In Parallel Mothers (2021), an unusual childrearing arrangement results from two women’s friendship after they give birth in a hospital at the same time. In The Room Next Door (2024), a woman makes an enormous sacrifice for her friend, agreeing to aid her illegal euthenasia. The power and complexity of female friendship and support is ever present, even in the darkest of circumstances.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/rSR03P6
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