The Lovers (Les Amants), 1928
René Magritte
Art Institute of Chicago
Kissing is one of the most intimate human acts. It can be loving, erotic, or thrilling—and sometimes all three. Art history is littered with romantic smooches, such as Gustav Klimt’s iconic, gold-drenched 1907 painting The Kiss. Some artists have turned kissing into a surreal act, including René Magritte, whose 1928 painting The Lovers shows two heads eerily covered in cloth as they kiss. Other works mine the moment of affection for high drama, such as Auguste Rodin’s 1882 marble sculpture The Kiss, which depicts two doomed lovers from Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
But for contemporary artists, kisses are often reframed acts of protest, challenging cultural stigmas, gender norms, and bigotry. Photographers such as Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans photographed young and queer couples in passionate embraces, defying rigid social rules with love and freedom. In a similar act of resistance this autumn, sculptor and collage artist Tschabalala Self will present a 12-foot-high sculpture of two Black figures kissing outside New York’s New Museum. The work is intended as a highly visible “insignia of love” for the surrounding streets. Here, Artsy shares eight artworks that break down taboos and stereotypes through radical depictions of tender connection.
Salman Toor
Three Kissers, 2024
Pakistani artist Salman Toor is known for his richly rendered paintings of young, queer, Asian men. They are often shown in domestic or nightlife settings surrounded by piles of clothes and abundant plant life. His intimate scenes are full of fun and excitement, with nude figures pillow-fighting or affectionately entangled in bed. Toor’s 2024 painting Three Kissers shows a group of men leaning towards one another with eyes closed and mouths open. The composition and eyeline of the work place the viewer in close proximity with his three figures, as though we are part of the group rather than coldly observing.
The artist challenges the cultural and heteronormative expectation for kisses to be an act between two people, expanding this into a taboo-busting group activity, to which the viewer is openly invited. Toor’s exquisite brushwork blends the bodies together at their meeting points, as they become a single tangle. Like many of his pieces, this painting celebrates a queer group act full of youthful joy and heated passion.
Zanele Muholi
Kiss, 2003
In their photography, Zanele Muholi confronts the violence that queer communities face in South Africa. Many of their previous projects draw attention to the horrific act of “corrective rape” enacted on lesbian women and highlights the women who have been killed for their sexuality.
Muholi’s 2003 black-and-white photograph Kiss shows a moment of heartfelt love between two young women. This piece is part of Muholi’s series “Only Half the Picture” (2003–06). While the project conveys tenderness and deep connection between lovers, it also documents survivors of hate crimes who have faced extreme violence in apartheid and post-apartheid culture in South Africa. Muholi portrays their subjects, who also collaborate on the final image, with dignity, highlighting their courage and defiance in the face of ongoing discrimination.
Joan Semmel
Hold, 1972
American painter Joan Semmel has dedicated her career to depicting sexual freedom, challenging stigmas around pleasure. Many of her early pieces, in which bodies are flooded with vibrant strokes of colored paint, were drawn from New York sex parties and swingers’ clubs, portraying group pleasure as liberating, rather than seedy.
Her 1972 painting Hold shows two nude figures in a loving yet clumsy embrace, their limbs tangled together and faces pressed in a kiss. Each clutches the back of the other’s head. The top body is drenched in a hot pinkish-red, contrasting with the simple green and orange elsewhere in the painting. Semmel breaks down the vanity often attached to images of sexuality, composing her images as though viewers are also part of the action. Here, the kiss is fumbling and everyday, the lovers lost in a moment of pleasure that defies typical presentations of airbrushed eroticism.
Banksy
Kissing Coppers, 2004
Love him or hate him, Banksy knows how to grab attention. The British artist’s 2004 mural Kissing Coppers is perhaps one of his most well-known works, recognizable far beyond the traditional reaches of the art world. The piece shows two male-presenting policemen canoodling, their handcuffs and baton taking on an erotic overtone in this context. Banksy wanted to challenge the homophobic culture of the UK and police brutality by showing these two figures in an act of love rather than violence. Painted on the side of a pub in Brighton, the public piece was repeatedly vandalized before being removed and sold by the pub’s owner to a buyer in Miami in 2014.
Omar Mismar
Two Unidentified Lovers in a Mirror, 2023
Shown at the Venice Biennale in 2024, Omar Mismar’s mosaic plate depicts a moment of desire between two nude men as they lean towards one another for a kiss. The Lebanese artist’s plate brings contemporary Arab culture together with ancient Byzantine art, using classical techniques to celebrate queer love. He was inspired by the coded sexuality of ancient art, which took a different approach to homosexual themes: In those works, it’s common to see men wrestling, or mythological male characters such as nymphs and satyrs in intimate positions. The intertwined pattern that runs around the edge of the plate reflects the intimacy of the central couple’s romantic union. The tiles on the faces look as though they have been scrambled from their original positions, blurring the identities of their subjects, in reference to the criminalization of gay love in Mismar’s native Lebanon.
Marilyn Minter
“Elder Sex,” 2022
Marilyn Minter’s photographs are instantly recognizable, regularly featuring mouths open in pleasure and faces thrust passionately against condensation-streaked glass. In 2022, the American artist’s project “Elder Sex” gathered a group of men and women over the age of 70 to capture a side of love and passion that is rarely seen. In these images, couples kiss and caress one another in extreme close-up, challenging the taboos and contempt that surrounds pleasure between older people.
Minter’s goal in taking these images was to make her models appear desirable and elegant; glossy painted fingernails, bright backgrounds and jewel-toned underwear tap into an overt expression of sexuality that eschews the polite, peck-on-the-lips connection usually shown between elders. When first released, they made a huge splash: The images were published in the New York Times alongside a feature highlighting how active and pleasurable sex later in life can be.
Erwin Wurm
Abstract Sculptures (Kiss), 2013
Erwin Wurm regularly features sausages and gherkins in his humorous sculptures, playfully subverting traditional hyper-masculinity in art. Since masculinity, as he sees it, is already loaded with notions of toughness and machismo, his works use gentle wit rather than aggressive attacks. The penis, in his view, is “inseparable” from toxic masculinity and the extreme violence of wars, so, he has said, “I like to make fun of it”. In 2013’s Abstract Sculptures (Kiss), two hyper-smooth wieners clutch at one another, their legs wrapped together, meeting in a kiss that is evocatively passionate despite the fact they have disconcertingly featureless faces. Here, Wurm playfully mocks the fear of gentle connection between heterosexual men, showing two objects that represent the worst of patriarchal violence in a moment of unbridled love.
D’Angelo Lovell Williams
The Lovers, 2017
The works of American photographer D’Angelo Lovell Williams explore the performance of gender and sexuality, and the intimate bonding rituals that exist especially between Black couples, friends, and family. In their 2017 photograph The Lovers, Magritte’s iconic painting is subverted, showing the artist and their partner kissing, both faces covered by black silk durags. Though the central moment of the photo is purposely obscured, the remaining parts of the work show a huge amount of intimacy. The contemporary lovers’ arms wrap together, their hands gently holding the back of each other’s necks. The image both reveals and conceals its queer protagonists. It also conveys a proud expression of love, defying the cultural pressure for Black men to hide such overt displays of tenderness.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/4F7Wd9z
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