Frieze Masters Explores Modernism Through A Queer Lens

(MENAFN- USA Art News) This year's Frieze Masters fair features a curated thread titled“Queering Modernism: Visual Languages of the 20th Century,” organized by Anke Kempkes. The section examines Modernism through a queer perspective, revealing what Kempkes describes as“a striking wealth of unconventional, at times distinctly anti-canonical, aesthetic languages, subjects and forms of representation.”

Kempkes, who recently curated the 2025 exhibition“Queer Modernism 1900 to 1950” at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, has spread this current presentation across the entire fair. It traces LGBTQ+ representation and queer experiences from the early 20th century to the emergence of a Postmodern queer art scene in the 1980s. During periods when homosexuality faced censorship or punishment, artists often conveyed same-sex desire subtly, utilizing myths, religious narratives, nude figures, portraits, and clothing. Kempkes characterizes this as a culture of“innuendo” and the“known secret,” where established historical or mythological imagery served to encode identities and desires that could not be openly expressed. Artists often“deploy[ed] familiar [tropes] as a kind of historical drag” to veil homoeroticism, with Narcissus being a particularly enduring allegorical figure, as seen in works such as Caravaggio's Narcissus (around 1597-99).

The thread highlights figures like Iranian artist Bahman Mohassess, whose work is presented by Ab-Anbar Gallery. Mohassess, who worked in Tehran from 1954 following Iran's coup d'état, often destroyed his own works, mirroring what Frieze describes as“the erasure of his identity.” Salman Matinfar, the gallery's director, notes that Mohassess was both a product and challenger of his era, with his art being“heavily political and you can see his sexuality in the work.” His mythological figures of the 1960s depicted“a theatre of scarred, limbless and doomed bodies that offered a powerful indictment of political injustice, war, state violence and the looming ecological crisis,” according to Kempkes. By the 1970s, his fauns and minotaurs became“increasingly charged with homoeroticism and sexual provocation,” leading to the removal and mutilation of his bronze nude Faun Musician, erected in 1971 in front of Tehran's new City Theatre, during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In the 1980s, Mohassess began to“effectively start to queer the Minotaur,” a figure prominently used by Pablo Picasso.

Kempkes emphasizes that Mohassess's practice“unsettles the Eurocentric canon of postwar art,” with his openly gay identity and engagement with the grotesque permeating his work as an aesthetic and critical force against violence and alienation. Kempkes aimed to avoid an exclusively European or American focus for queer Modernism, using artists like Mohassess to tell a more global story. Another example is Ismael Nery, presented by Danielian gallery from Rio de Janeiro. Nery developed an“intensely personal, mystical language of androgyny and gender fluidity” in 1920s and 1930s Brazil, challenging fixed identities. Meanwhile, Agnews features two portraits: Glyn Philpot's King Balthazar (1929), depicting Henry Thomas, who became Philpot's primary model and romantic interest, and Lotte Laserstein's Portrait of Louis Hahne (1939), painted after her escape from Nazi Germany with the help of gallerist sisters Signe Schultz and Alice Lagerbjelke. Kempkes notes that mutual portraiture among artists served as an“intimate currency” and a way to dismantle social hierarchies during this period.

The exhibition also addresses the 1980s, which Kempkes sees as a critical period marked by the AIDS crisis, which tragically cut short artists' lives and left many queer artists' practices vulnerable to disappearance. She notes that“artists often died without direct heirs, leaving entire bodies of work vulnerable to dispersal or even erasure.” The Colombian artist Luis Fernando Zapata, jointly presented by Galería Elvira Moreno and Alonso Garcés Galería, is one such case. Diagnosed HIV positive in the mid-1980s, Zapata explored mortality and transcendence, as seen in his final series of 12 sarcophagi, including Sarcofagi N° 9 (1992-94). Kempkes describes these works not merely as emblems of death, but as having“the simplicity of cradles, vessels of cosmic rebirth rather than merely funerary containers.”

While this historical perspective is presented at Frieze Masters, dealer Susanne Albrecht, who is showcasing Ruth Bernhard's work on her Galerie Albrecht stand, cautions against exclusively categorizing artists as“queer.” Albrecht states:“I don't think the photographs are limited to the 'queer,' but of course one can interpret her love of female bodies from a queer perspective. You can sense the love and respect she feels for the female body, which is not merely a body. It has a soul. There is no voyeurism,” she added, referring to Bernhard's carefully staged images.

Kempkes argues that the art market can facilitate art-historical recovery. She explains that many queer artists lacked conventional family structures or direct heirs to preserve their legacies, and sometimes family members distanced themselves from inherited work. These factors have made the preservation and reconstruction of their work“particularly difficult,” making the“extraordinary efforts” of participating galleries essential. However, Kempkes adds:“We should be careful not to assume that queer Modern artists were necessarily marginalised in their own time or remain undervalued today,” noting that many artists in“Queering Modernism” are highly celebrated.

Source: The Art Newspaper

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