Queer identities, female sexuality, and political upheaval

The late 20th century was defined by a multitude of shifts, perhaps most significantly by the fall of the Iron Curtain which ended the Cold War, the rise of the internet, and increased globalization. In terms of art history, appropriation art and Neo-expressionism, which had distinguished the previous decade, were usurped by a landscape that embraced the social turn of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics – art becoming situational and process-based – as well as new media art and immersive installations.

In the early 1980s, painting was dominated by a generation of young artists such as Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring – whose style was once described by Roberta Smith in a New York Times article as ‘when brash met flash.’ A few years later, while there were whispers that painting was – once again – dead, accompanied by a certain institutional discretization of the medium, some artists continued to turn their hand to it, pushing at the boundaries of what pigment on surface could constitute. Extending painting into an expanded field was one new approach, perhaps most pointedly enacted by the likes of Katharina Grosse (b. 1961) and Jessica Stockholder (b. 1959). So while it was out of fashion, it was not altogether out of the frame.

Take, for example, Polly Apfelbaum’s (b. 1955) Splendor in the Grass, Glory in the Flower (1994), presented by Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder. Creating a color chart of sorts, the artist stained individual pieces of sumptuous crushed velvet with rich pigments, moving from red through yellow, green, and blue, eventually reaching black. The work is about fluidity of form, examining how a painting could be conceptually open – evading brushwork and gesture – while still retaining a sense of structure. Apfelbaum’s unique aesthetic upended notions of masculine authority in painting, replacing the giant canvas with materials more reminiscent of ‘female’ craft practices, resulting in what she termed ‘fallen paintings.’ 

Artists increasingly focused on identity politics toward the late 1980s and early 1990s – in parallel to its rise in the mainstream, not least in North America with the 1992 Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of the police officers who had been filmed beating Rodney King, or the AIDS crisis. Gender, race, and sexuality rose to prominence as artistic subject matter. The Brazilian artist José Leonilson (1957–1993) was recognized for his poetic vision during Brazil’s intense social upheaval following decades of repression at the hands of authoritarian military dictatorship. He often explored emotion, introspection, and the human body in his work. Becoming increasingly ill with AIDS in 1991, he had to stop painting because the fumes made him sick, and instead turned to embroidery, shifting the gendered associations of this medium. An earlier work on unstretched canvas, The existing volcano (1986), on show at Galeria Luisa Strina, renders in acrylic two heads floating between smoking volcanoes, marked by an exchange of fire-like energy. One appears exhausted, the other emits laser rays from his eyes – the dual personalities of a single being trying to find their place in the world. The first European touring exhibition of Leonilson’s work will open at the end of November, organized by Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

Vibrant reds, greens and blues jostle in the expressionistic use of color by the Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión (1962–1996). Presented by waldengallery, his distinctive work foregrounded the erotic. In Hermafrodita (1989), an intersex person reclines inverted, pert breasts and penis giving way to gravity, surrounded by swift gestural strokes marking the meeting of blue sky with green earth. Centurión was living in Argentina in the 1980s, when the end of the dictatorship opened up a new period of freedom in the country, although queer sexuality remained taboo. Inspired by Henri Matisse’s (1869­­­–1954) cutouts, Centurión celebrates nonbinary bodies, which brings vibrant energy and joie de vivre to renderings of the nude that were still deeply controversial at this moment in history.

On show at Galerist, Turkish artist Nil Yalter (b. 1938) similarly sought absolute freedom in her paintings – in this instance, women’s struggle for freedom and equality. The artist’s series Hommage à Marquis de Sade (1989) was made in honor of the French nobleman and writer the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), who was renowned for depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence. Some writers, including Angela Carter, have reappraised the work of de Sade through a feminist lens, underlining the way in which he co-opted certain sex acts – for example, sodomy – to liberate women from breeding and thus emancipate them not just sexually but socially. Yalter’s painting on paper – which is part of a larger multimedia installation – fragments the body into several parts. Fleshy skin tones of peach, purple and yellow abstract the body, gentle curves suggesting thighs and labia, maybe, but evading any clearly distinguishable form. The work alludes to the joys of flesh and the freedom that is possible in the undefined.

Ellen Cantor (1961–2013), who described her work as ‘adult in subject matter,’ was known for a practice that combined pornography and politics, to which Title Unknown (1990) attests. The oil-on-canvas image, at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, depicts the spanked pinkness of a woman’s buttocks, rouged heat emanating from the hand of the man whose knee she is bent over. His towering, deathly gray body rises from the bed’s own corpus – creased sheets recalling the hinge of an elbow, a pillow akin to a severed torso. Is this a scene of abuse or BDSM eroticism? The shadows of their respective limbs become puppets, her hand a silhouetted barking dog, compounding a sense of repressed libidinal energy and complicating the power play in the scene itself. Cantor’s work explores personal desire within the context of institutional violence. The strangest part of this painting is not the bottom-shaped pink moon overlooking a quiet town and churchyard, but the small figurine in the right-hand corner, its shadow doubling as a solid candlestick – just within reach, if the woman stretches. Emerging from the male-dominated artworld of the 1980s, defined by pushy painting, work by artists such as Cantor marked the beginning of a new decade, one in which pluralities would increasingly begin to emerge beyond the model of white, male, Western dominance.

‘OVR:20c’, Art Basel's Online Viewing Rooms dedicated to works made between 1900 and 1999, will run October 28–31, 2020.

Louisa Elderton is the Curatorial Editor at Gropius Bau, Project Editor of Phaidon's 'Vitamin' series, and an independent art critic contributing to Frieze, Artforum, and Flash Art, among other publications.

Top image: José Leonilson, The existing volcano (detail), 1986. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo. Photo by Edouard Fraipont.