TOM WESSELMANN: UP CLOSE
Almine Rech London is pleased to present 'Up Close,' Tom Wesselmann's sixth solo exhibition at the gallery.
March 5 – April 12, 2025
Artists have had a long and fruitful relationship with the naked human body, and with genitals specifically. Men’s erotic and even pornographic renditions of women are legion. Women have turned the tables, depicting men’s genitalia; think of Louise Bourgeois and Judith Bernstein. But what did these paintings mean to Wesselmann?
Wesselmann once said that the most important things in his life were painting, sex and humor. In the penis paintings, he seems to have brought the three together, as he himself saw: "It’s not easy to stand there with a straight face, I think," the artist allowed in a 1984 conversation with critic Irving Sandler, adding, "I think it is rather amusing." And while his naked women have perhaps lost a degree of sexual heat through familiarity, the images of Wesselmann’s hard member, even amid the flood of imagery made since he painted them, retain considerable spark, challenge, and an honest, healthy charge.
Even at the dawn of the "Golden Age of Porn"—a period that is often cited as beginning with the 1969 release of Andy Warhol’s explicit film Blue Movie and continued with the widespread distribution of X-rated films such as Deep Throat in 1972 and The Devil and Miss Jones in 1973—Wesselmann’s temerarious isolation of the erect penis as the central compositional feature of his canvases are nothing short of confrontational.
When read at face value, Wesselmann’s paintings are less about a specific desire or identity politics, than a celebration of erotic agency as such. His pricks are Popified—deliberately simplified forms (barely perceptible veins! not too much anatomical accuracy!), flat bold color, unflinching compositions in which the male member occupies the horizon line, layered over a seascape or a domestic interior. Along with his other fragmented genitalia paintings, these penis paintings function as unadulterated totems of libidinal liberation.