canonical, aesthetic languages, subjects and forms of representation\u201d, Kempkes says.<\/p>\n
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Anke Kempkes is curating the new thread, which is spread across Frieze\u00a0Masters Photo: Lina Bertucci<\/p>\n
Kempkes recently curated the 2025 exhibition Queer Modernism 1900 to 1950<\/a> at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in D\u00fcsseldorf. Now, this section at Frieze Masters, spread across the fair rather than contained within a single area, traces queer experience and LGBTQ+ representation from the early 20th century through to the emergence of a Postmodern queer art scene in the 1980s.<\/p>\n For artists working when homosexuality was censored or punished, openly showing same-sex desire was often impossible, leading them to instead express it through myths, religious stories, nude figures, portraits, clothing and in other subtle ways. Kempkes describes this as a culture of \u201cinnuendo\u201d and the \u201cknown secret\u201d, in which artists could use familiar historical or mythological imagery to encode identities and desires that could not be shown directly.<\/p>\n Artists could cloak homoeroticism in established iconographies, \u201cdeploying familiar [tropes] as a kind of historical drag\u201d, Kempkes says. Among the most enduring of these allegorical figures, she notes, is Narcissus, immortalised in paintings such as Caravaggio<\/a>\u2019s Narcissus (around 1597-99).<\/p>\n Kempkes connects this history to the Iranian artist Bahman Mohassess, who worked in Tehran from 1954 onwards, in the aftermath of Iran\u2019s coup d\u2019\u00e9tat. Mohassess\u2019s work is presented at Frieze Masters by Ab-Anbar Gallery<\/a>, which will showcase a variety of his paintings, collages, bronze sculptures and other works. Frieze describes the presentation as \u201cre-evaluating an artist who destroyed many of his own works to mirror the erasure of his\u00a0identity\u201d.<\/p>\n For the gallery\u2019s director, Salman Matinfar, Mohassess was both a product and a challenger of his time. His art was \u201cheavily political and you can see his sexuality in the work\u201d, Matinfar says. Mohassess was a daring and mysterious figure whose work was almost unknown, even among Iranian collectors, until recent years. Mohassess\u2019s mythological figures of the 1960s were \u201cmarked by an existentialist worldview\u2014a theatre of scarred, limbless and doomed bodies that offered a powerful indictment of political injustice, war, state violence and the looming ecological crisis\u201d, Kempkes says.<\/p>\n Global story<\/p>\n By the 1970s, Mohassess\u2019s fauns and minotaurs had become \u201cincreasingly charged with homoeroticism and sexual provocation,\u201d she says. His bronze nude Faun Musician, erected in 1971 in front of Tehran\u2019s new City Theatre, was removed and mutilated during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In the 1980s Mohassess \u201ceffectively started to queer the Minotaur\u201d, which was one of Pablo Picasso\u2019s most obsessive self-allegories.<\/p>\n Mohassess\u2019s practice \u201cunsettles the Eurocentric canon of postwar art,\u201d Kempkes says. Openly gay, queerness permeates his work, \u201coften through an engagement with the grotesque, as both an aesthetic and critical force, intertwined with his larger confrontation with violence, authoritarianism and the alienation of modern life\u201d. Kempkes has resisted treating queer Modernism as exclusively European or American, and Mohassess is one artist whose work helps to tell a more global story, given that queer experiences vary markedly across countries and cultures.<\/p>\n Glyn Philpot\u2019s King Balthazar (1929), featuring Henry Thomas, the artist\u2019s Jamaican-born sitter, is on show with Agnews Courtesy of Agnews<\/p>\n Another fascinating example is Ismael Nery, whose practice \u201cemerged from very different non-Western contexts, while forging transnational as well as local perspectives on Modernism,\u201d Kempkes says. Presented by Danielian gallery<\/a> from Rio de Janeiro, Nery developed in 1920s and 1930s Brazil an \u201cintensely personal, mystical language of androgyny and gender fluidity\u201d, she says. The artist used androgyny to challenge fixed identities, while others explored gender and sexuality through portraiture.<\/p>\n Two portraits at Agnews bring together very different stories of artistic and personal identity. Glyn Philpot\u2019s King Balthazar (1929) depicts Henry Thomas, a Jamaican-born sitter who would become the artist\u2019s most celebrated model.<\/p>\n Alongside it is Lotte Laserstein<\/a>\u2019s Portrait of Louis Hahne (1939), painted after she fled Nazi Germany. Laserstein left the country at the invitation of gallerist sisters Signe Schultz and Alice Lagerbjelke, whose intervention helped save her life.<\/p>\n The practice of mutual portraiture among artists during this period \u201cfunctioned as a form of intimate currency\u201d, vividly illustrated by Laserstein\u2019s \u201cprolific, gender-dissident portraits of her close companions\u201d, and as a way to dismantle social hierarchies, as seen in Philpot\u2019s use of the Biblical king to \u201cnavigate complex questions of identity and representation in interwar Britain\u201d, Kempkes says. Thomas was \u201cfar more than a passing muse\u201d, Kempkes adds. He became Philpot\u2019s \u201cprimary model for years to come, as well as his manservant and romantic interest\u201d.<\/p>\n Death of a movement<\/p>\n The D\u00fcsseldorf exhibition\u2019s endpoint in the 1980s is also significant. For Kempkes, this period demands renewed attention. It marks a rupture in which the Aids crisis cut short artists\u2019 lives and careers while leaving many queer artists\u2019 practices vulnerable to disappearance. \u201cArtists often died without direct heirs, leaving entire bodies of work vulnerable to dispersal or even erasure,\u201d Kempkes\u00a0says.<\/p>\n The Colombian artist Luis Fernando Zapata, presented jointly by Galer\u00eda Elvira Moreno<\/a> and Alonso Garc\u00e9s Galer\u00eda<\/a>, represents one such case. Diagnosed HIV positive in the mid-1980s, Zapata increasingly turned towards mortality and transcendence in his work, such as in his final series of 12 sarcophagi, including Sarcofagi N\u00b0 9 (1992-94), which is in this section. \u201cYet rather than functioning simply as emblems of death,\u201d Kempkes says, works such as Sarcofagi N\u00b0 9 possess the simplicity of cradles\u2014\u201cvessels of cosmic rebirth rather than merely funerary containers.\u201d<\/p>\n Moonrise (1962) by Ruth Bernhard is one of a number of the artist\u2019s photographs presented by Galerie Albrecht Courtesy of Galerie Albrecht<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/7eb7a6da3e788f8109af64ea5714f9c0aa07334d-1661x2000.jpg\"\/)
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