Eros Rising
Eros grabs me
Eros tells me what to do
you’re going to live…says Eros
you’re going to live inside your flesh.*
Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt’s opulent crowns and zany candy dishes feature lollipops of Bill Costa beefcake; the two artists’ contrasting aesthetics ripple through the accompanying salon-style group show, Eros Rising, curated by Allen Frame, which tracks a century of erotic tension in photographs, drawings, and paintings by 41 artists.
Among the highlights in the glimmering echo and sultry undertow are Pavel Tchelitchew’s ink wash of sailors, ca.1930s; Vicky West’s drawing of an epic fetish orgy, ca. 1970-90s; Alvin Baltrop’s iconic photos from the West Side piers, 1977; Libuše Jarcovjáková’s image of a woman’s bare backside as she leans out a window through lace curtains in 1980s West Berlin; and Oliver Herring’s photos of models from his Studio series, 2015-17, using glitter, mylar, flour, and paint to create mythic intensity.
Desire, longing, fantasy, and spectacle align in a dense array of inter-generational work where cinematic tropes abound: Ann Weathersby’s stacked female portraits smuggled into rose-colored kilnformed glass; Boris Torres’ saucy paintings sourced from 80s French porn films, and Ethan Cherry’s spare, tremulous drawings from contemporary porn videos; Michela Palermo’s smoldering image of a woman’s back, her bra slipping off; Frank Franca’s luminous nude man in boots, standing in a spotlight; Rachel Stern’s seductive gloved hand reaching out from a theater curtain with a leafy philodendron; Shohei Miyachi’s graphic couple, (that includes himself), locked in a closeup sex encounter; and Stephen Barker’s enmeshed bodies in an East Village sex club, from his Nightswimming series, along with his riveting life drawings from nude male models.
Juxtapositions heighten the atmosphere of casual intimacy: Mariette Pathy Allen’s trans lovers, one shaving the other’s legs; Kunwar Prithvi Singh Rathore’s bare legs, his own and his queer lover’s, stretched out over a coffee table; and Darrel Ellis’ young friends lounging on a sofa.
Eros is indeed rising, in Sue Williams’ print of a man’s orgasm—spewing upward like ageyser—but Eros is also falling, in Jan Rattia’s photo of a man tumbling off a sofa onto the floor. Eros inhabits nature, as bees pollinate flowers on outstretched fingers and berries replace fingertips in Jihye Baek’s charcoal drawings. “Eros, c’est la vie,” said Rrose Sélavy.
Self-portraits accent thematic groupings: Richard Renaldi at 19, nude on a window sill; Marley Trigg Stewart, caught in the mirror of an LA sauna; Darryl DeAngelo Terell’s abstraction of self in a Brooklyn park, a sparkling trace of their performative self; and Lori Ordover’s trance-like nude, reflected though a window and merging into the dark landscape. Jo Ann Chaus stares herself down in a rear-view mirror. Amina Gingold is all knees, arms, and fingers, clutching clumps of hair. A bare-legged figure bends over Patricia Voulgaris to dunk her head into a bucket; the head seems disembodied. In Ryan Zogheb’s two close-up oil self-portraits, his dissolving visage looks out as it surrenders to illegibility.
Along with the self come the muse and the beloved, and the myriad ways of apprehending them. A Charles Henri Ford photo depicts his smiling young lover running towards him on the beach; Marc Ohrem-LeClef observes the drops of water on the undulating back and shoulders of a young man by the sea; Miguel Ferrando and Adriel Visoto both paint their lovers sleeping. Katherine Finkelstein’s carnivalesque figure perches ceremoniously on a swing, in the woods, as if part of a ritual. Jeanette Spicer creates a sensual collage of two women, (one pregnant), in pensive reverie.
Fernan Bilik revisits Courbet’s obsession with Joanna Hiffernan through a portrait of his own, a young woman on a cell phone whose copper tresses fall over her shoulder and onto a table. Cansu Korkmaz juxtaposes torn images of two women, one whose eyes peer through a shutter, and one with a wide-open mouth, herself—a scream or playful confrontation? Romaine Brooks-biographer Cassandra Langer’s watercolor of four figures in metaphysical repose suggests, as she says, “the various stages of selves in a lifetime oraspects of a single self evolving at various stages.”
Conflicting emotions swirl and converge in this panorama of erotic experience: Paul Burnham Schwartz’s masked nude, lying back, submissively; Ian Lewandowski’s man-in-underwear, zoning out, dancing alone in a nondescript space; Matt Leifheit’s Fire Island night Caravaggesque Cupid, partnered with the twisting limb of a tree, like a whispered tango.
Jimmy Wright, with a watercolor and two ink drawings from his 1975 Bathhouse series, remembers going to the First Avenue Club Baths and coming upon Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt’s cubicle— lit up with colored lights, he says. Lanigan-Schmidt remembers otherwise: it was not his cubicle, (which had just the glow from an 8-watt red light bulb he had installed himself) but the one next door. He could see into it through a hole in the wall. A very large man in a tiny bathrobe had strung up the colored lights and sat munching from a huge bag of potato chips—The Potato Chip Queen, Tommy called him.
*Untitled fragment from the poetry collection The Bronze Arms by Richie Hofmann, Alfred A. Knopf, 2026