Some documentation of Suppose You Are Not - works from the Ömer Koç collection which is on view through December 29th 2024 at the Arter museum in Istanbul. Thrilled to be showing my Adlocutio (Sean Ford) sculpture alongside so many of my art heroes and iconic works in this major museum show. The scope and scale is really quite breathtaking! If you’re in/around Istanbul before the end of the year then it’s absolutely worth a visit.
A few snaps and installation views from the opening night of SHADOW-BAN as part of the Tom of Finland Foundation Arts & Culture Festival which is on view through November 15th at ShowStudio in London.
As part of the 40th anniversary celebrations for Tom of Finland Foundation and the annual Arts & Culture Festival, Nick Knight and SHOWstudio Gallery announce SHADOW-BAN: an exhibition on illicit content in modern art, including existing and new paintings, sculpture, film, photography and performances by artists including Peter Saville, George Rouy, Ray Caesar, Oh de Laval, Emma Stern, Sonny Hall, Dinos Chapman, Michaela Stark, Miles Greenberg, Pierre Molinier, Nobuyoshi Araki, Simon Foxton, Harley Weir and Von Wolfe, together with a collaboration with the Tom of Finland Foundation.
SHADOW-BAN defies global censorship and the restrictions placed on visual culture today. Social media posts deemed explicit in nature - whether they are politically or sexually charged - are resulting in artists and creatives being shadow-banned by the morals of an algorithm. By definition, shadow-ban means to block (a user) from a social media site or online forum without their knowledge by making their posts and comments no longer visible to other users.
Bringing together a collection of artists united in challenging the suppression of illicit and taboo subjects by mainstream platforms, this exhibition invites the public to reassess how their own morality is shaped by societal pressures. SHADOW-BAN reconsiders
the nature of what makes an artwork 'obscene' and the moral judgments which led us here.
Running alongside the annual Art & Culture Festival, SHADOW- BAN will feature a selection of works from Tom of Finland and 15 of Tom of Finland Foundation’s network of Queer erotic artists. The Foundation’s Artist-in-Residence program ensures support for the next generation of Queer erotic artists while promoting healthier, more tolerant attitudes about sexuality.
Established in 1984, the non-profit Tom of Finland Foundation protects, preserves and promotes the legacy of Tom of Finland and supports LGBTQ+ artists’ creative freedom of expression. Artists include Daffy of London, Daniel Austin Lopez, Enrique Agudo, Franko B., Gray Wielbinski, Mr Gruts, James Davison, JJ Guest, Łukasz Leja, Marc-Aurèle Debut, Olivia Sterling, Orpheus, Pol Anglada, Sal Salandra and Stuart Sandford.
SHADOW-BAN opens at the SHOWstudio Gallery, 22D Ebury St, Belgravia, London SW1W 0LU, from September 19 - November 15, 2024.
Weekend Schedule
Saturday, 21st September
12:00 – 1:30pm
Franko B in conversation with Hetty Mahlic
4:00 – 4:40pm
“Power, pride and shame: Dynamics of disability and care in play” with Dan Daw & Richard Villani
5:30 – 6:15pm
In Conversation with Durk Dehner & Guy Burch
Sunday, 22nd September
12:00 – 1:00pm
Live Performance with Electric Adam
2:00 – 2:30pm
In Conversation with Daniel Lismore
5:00 – 6:30pm
IN CAMERA with Durk Dehner & Hetty Mahlich
For those wanting to know just exactly which prints are in my XX Portfolio, here’s a little video! Presented in an embossed archival clamshell box, these 20 photographs, all taken between 2004 to 2024, are 10 x 8 in / 25.4 x 20.32 cm each and are hand signed, dated, and numbered. Lmited to only 20 editions. The archival box measures 10.2 x 8.2 x 1.1 in / 26 x 21 x 3 cm and is signed and numbered. It can be purchased here: www.stuartsandford.com/purchase/xx-portfolio
I’m over the moon to announce the release of my latest book Stuart Sandford XX Photography 2004-2024 which is a celebration of 20 years of my photography work. This book brings together work from 2004 all the way up to the present day and includes an essay by Rubén Esparza and an interview about my work with Slava Mogutin. The book is available as a Standard Edition and an Artists Edition with a 10 x 8 inch C-tpye photographic print. Both editions are signed and numbered.
Standard Edition of 200 - $75 (plus shipping)
Artists Edition of 20 - $200 (plus shipping)
180 pages, colour, perfect bound, 25.4 x 20.32 cm
It’s been 20 years since I began my photographic journey when I first picked up a camera and thought perhaps this could be my creative life. To celebrate, I’m releasing both a portfolio of 20 selected works and also a book. Images and more details below. The portfolio is now available to purchase here and the book will be available to pre-order soon and will be released September 1st 2024.
How cool is this??? The Tom of Finland Foundation x Diesel 2024 Pride capsule collection featuring a selection of my Polaroids is now available in select stores and online worldwide.
This is the third collaboration between ToFF and Diesel and marks the Foundation’s 40th anniversary. As well as my own work, other artists in the 28 piece collection include TANK, Suzanne Schifflet and The Hun. Available online now on the Diesel website.
Pleasure Gardens with Matt Smith, Guillermo Martin Bermejo, James Mortimer and myself is now open and runs through June 29th. More info from the gallery and a list of available works here.
Last weekend saw the 40th anniversary Berlin iteration of the Tom of Finland Foundation Arts & Culture Festival at the iconic Berghain. Over 100 artists were involved with screenings, talks, and parties. Below are some installation images from in and around the festival.
My London gallery James Freeman Gallery opens the Pleasure Gardens on June 6th. I’ll be showing two works alongside three of the other gallery artists, Guillermo Martin Bermejo, James Mortimer, and Matt Smith, and I hope to see you there at the opening reception.
The Pleasure Gardens of 18th century London were a destination not just for entertainment but for social freedom – in 1732 Vauxhall Gardens saw the earliest verified public appearance of a gay man in London, John Cooper, better known as Princess Seraphina. The gardens’ roots, however, were much grittier: in his diaries of the 1660s Samuel Pepys describes them as a place of “boys doing tumbling tricks” and drunken visitors seeking sexual favours. This exhibition explores the legacy of pleasure gardens from a gay male perspective as spaces of social and sexual liberty, through the work of four contemporary artists: Matt Smith, Guillermo Martin Bermejo, Stuart Sandford, and James Mortimer.
Matt Smith’s artworks reconfigure traditional aesthetic forms from a queer perspective to look at how accepted histories underpin social limitations. The two re-worked textiles here examine the eighteenth century love of pastoralism and its implicit sense of natural order. Geometric patterns embedded into bucolic scenes suggest how seemingly benign cultural narratives involve rigid rules of what is deemed acceptable. His black parian ceramics similarly rework neoclassical sculptural forms but undermine them with suggestive marine shapes, two disembodied spouts joined by a string of pearls oozing a seaside sauciness beneath the veneer of refined elegance.
Guillermo Martin Bermejo’s drawings describe a romantic inner world populated by remembered faces, often creatives or artists, whom Guillermo displaces into the mountains near his home north of Madrid. His scenes thus become become part fact, part fiction, glimpses of an inner realm that he draws onto pages rescued from old books as if bringing forgotten stories back to life. The group of drawings here all orbit around the theme of cruising, with romantic figures glimpsed in light-speckled glades, half-hidden in a forest. The natural space is here a place of enchantment, of anonymity, allure, and discovery.
Stuart Sandford’s sculptures look at the classical tradition of the ideal human form, reinterpreting it through the gay male gaze and contemporary 3D modelling. What was once a philosophical abstract, the ideal concept versus imperfect flesh, is in Stuart’s work articulated as a polished template 3D scanned and cast in bronze. The Wrestler/s here presents a naked man grappling with himself like a feature in a quintessential classical garden, channelling the raw energy and animal urges that natural spaces give rein to. Stuart’s painting ‘Self Portrait with Leo #1’ sees this aggression turn into lust, rendered in Polaroid flash-lit chiaroscuro.
James Mortimer’s paintings describe a natural world whose inhabitants are unrestricted by social convention or self-consciousness. His settings are idyllic, a subconscious world of raw unfettered instincts. In this bucolic land the inhabitants are driven by the twin urges of sex and violence, characteristics they share with the animals on equal terms. Dogs are savage; lambs slaughtered; horses on the point of being so. Amidst this the humans lounge in blissful oblivion, or fight amongst themselves as fires break out in the distance. The pleasure garden here is a dreamlike landscape, symbolic of untrammelled human nature.
‘Pleasure Gardens’ opens on Thursday 6 June, 6:30 – 8:30pm. To register for the PDF preview please email the gallery.
I’ll be taking part in this years Tom of Finland 2024 Art & Culture Festival in Berlin at the legendary Berghain. The festival runs the weekend of May 31st through June 2nd and I’ll be showing some Polaroid based works as well as taking part in a talk with my fellow artists. Tickets are available now via the link above as well as the full schedule of events, talks, and screenings.
A few installation shots and snaps from the opening of Carne Sagrada (Sacred Meat), fundraising exhibition for @manos.amigues here in CDMX. Featuring unique artworks and prints by local and international artists including:
Alejandro Ruiz
Andrés Gudiño
Antonio Zaragoza
Bruce LaBruce
Donovan Quiroz
ektor García
Fabián Chairez
Fidel Blanco
G del Diablo
Gio Black Peter
Joaquín Fierro
Lechedevirgen
Óscar Sánchez Gómez
Raul de Nieves
Ricardo Velmor
Rubén Esparza
Slava Mogutin
Stuart Sandford
Tony Solis
All proceeds benefit Manos Amigues, a community dining room and LGBTTTQI+ cultural centre. Exhibition curated by @slavamogutin & @perrasdemuseo
Manos Amigues
Pedro Moreno #113
Col. Guerrero. Ciudad de México
A few installation views of Pleasure Boy which us now on view in Zurich.
Thrilled to announce that my first solo presentation in Switzerland opens January 5th in Zurich! I’ll be showing selected works from my ongoing Polaroid Collages series (2018-TBA) and my Polaroid Collages - LA/CDMX series (2022).
Titled Pleasure Boy, the exhibition is curated by Steven Anggrek for Anggrek Agency and runs through march 30th.
The 20th edition of My Gay Eye / Mein schwules Auge is now available and features a few pages of my work and my life-size Aldocutio (Sean Ford) sculpture. Grab a copy via their website: www.mygayeye.com
400 pages with works by more than 80 international artists among them Johnny Abbate, Henning von Berg, Sabatino Cersosimo, Norbert Bisky, Male Shibari, Slava Mogutin, Josef Wolfgang Ohlert, Ohm Phanphiroj, Sal Salandra, Peter Schmid, Stanley Stellar, Wolfgang Tillmans, Tom of Finland and many more. Exclusive text contributions by Michael Ampersant, Jan Gympel, Thomas Luthardt, Brane Mozetič, Felice Picano, Steven Reigns, Jens Rosteck, Michael Sollorz, Edmund White and more. (Texts in both German and English.)
The first version of my new sculpture The Wrestler/s is now available. Inspired by the lost Greek bronze sculpture The Wrestlers (also known as The Two Wrestlers, The Uffizi Wrestlers or The Pancrastinae), this updated version emphasises the inherent sexuality and tension of that form by repeating the figure (the same model was 3D scanned in both the "top" and "bottom" positions to create the work), giving him both dominant and submissive roles.
Created using 3D scanning and modelling techniques, this edition is cast in bronze and is available in a painted white edition as well as a classic brown patinated edition to reflect the original ancient bronze. Both are in editions of 5 and are 30.4 × 14.7 × 24.3 cm / 12 x 5.8 x 9.6 in. Two editions remain of the painted white version and four in the classic brown patina. A larger version will also be available early next year. If you're interested in this larger version, please do get in touch.
This weekend in Los Angeles at the Soho Warehouse sees the LA iteration of the 2023 Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival. Tickets available here: www.tomoffinland.org/artfair
The Festival is ToFF’s yearly programming effort to bring together artists, galleries and patrons from all over the globe in a socially friendly setting, so that they can network as well as buy and sell works. I’ll have a new print available as well as a new zine. For those of you not able to attend, you can purchase a copy of the zine online via this link.
This new zine continues my exploration of the ‘selfie’ which I began in 2007 with my celebrated Cumfaces series. These images were generated by entering the prompt ‘photo of a young man in his underwear taking a selfie in the mirror’.
On new now and running through September 16th, Désir (Desire) is a group exhibition at Instinct Berlin. Curated by Yves de Brabaner and Eric le Rouge. I’m showing three works from my Polaroid Collages - LA/CDMX (2022) series, installation views below. More info: www.instinct.berlin
A digital limited edition version of my new sculpture The Wrestler/s is now available via Sedition Art. This version is rendered in pink fleshy Carrara marble in an edition of 30.
HD video, duration 2:40, 27 editions remaining. Price increases as the edition sells.
On view in Los Angeles and online via Artsy is 𝘋𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘈𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘢'𝘴 𝘘𝘶𝘦𝘦𝘳 𝘚𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴, a group exhibition curated by Steve Galindo and Arushi Kapoor. Participating artists:
Evangeline Adalyrion, Alannah Farrell, Stuart Sandford, Little Ricky aka Ricky Sension, Mia Weiner, Sara Sandoval, Duane Paul, Naruki Kukita, Sophia Gasporian, Joey Brock, Miguel Reyes Angel, Ruben Esparza
Viewable only by appointment: steve@thestyleguyde.com
www.artsy.net/show/arushi-gallery-decoding-americanas-queer-sensibilities
