galerie Nuke

Galerie Analix Forever is pleased to present a new group show in Paris with a fabulous group of artists, in collaboration with Galerie Nuke.

Barbara Polla of Analix Forever and Jenny Mannerheim of Nuke Magazine & Galerie have curated a group exhibition currently showing at Galerie Nuke in Paris entitled Beautiful Penis.  Inspired by Polla's new book Tout à fait Femme published by Odile Jacob, this show explores male sexuality from the female's perspective. 

Polla questions why female creativity does not typically celebrate male sexuality, whereas the history of art is full of works by men that gloriously represent the female body and sexual attributes. 

The exhibition title is inspired by a work of Tracey Emin of the same name, made in 2002.  The piece is a hand stitched erect penis, fragile, lifting up towards the sky with flowers and stars. 

Beautiful Penis is not meant to be taken literally.  It does not appear here only in anatomical form, as much as an artistic vision and many creative representations.

Artistically speaking, the penis/phallus during the past few centuries has primarily been ignored or explored between tragedy and derision (in the 1970's as an obliged figure of feminist art). We draw aside these approaches, to instead concentrate on the question of why the male body and the penis are not more often represented as a body of glory, joy and magnificence; without excluding the smile, amusement or fulfillment of wonder they can provide. The engine of creation for the women artists of Beautiful Penis, goes from desire to desire and from desire to pleasure – the pleasure of creating.  Tracey Emin occupies this position with her work, which has given us the title of the show, Beautiful Penis.

Pascal Quignard, in Sex and Terror, underlines the potentially frightening vision of male sex. Quignard explores the duality of mentula/fascinus (penis/phallus), the semantics of the two states, concretized among Romans by the distinction between man and man in erection (man in desire), semantics also abundantly explored by Bruce Nauman.

Sabine Pigalle proposes a penis of clown like androgyny, reminiscent of Nauman's clowns or Sébastien Vaillant's death caps. Joanna Malinowska, in anthropologist language, also refers to Nauman with a portrait series entitled, Penis Envy.

Between desire and desire: Maro Michalakakos, Vanessa Beecroft and Elena Kovylina, take a quasi-scientific exploration of masculinity. Clearly formed by desire, the very important work completed over many years by Sarah Lucas, who's representations of the penis have passed from the most banal materials (beer quills, cigarettes), to the noblest - sculpture.

Also exploring desire is the work of Dana Hoey, photographer of strangeness, which affirms that female desire can have great feminist gesture. Michaela Spiegel and Ornela Vorpsi are located in a ludic desire of diverted representations, whereas Katerina Jebb and Leslie Deere surprise us by their representations of the male sexual beauty, olfactive and sound respectively. Utilising a vibrator as sound device, Deere played percussive instruments with a mechanised sex toy.  The result is an evocative tonal sound collage that lulls and drifts. 

THIS EXHIBITION WILL RE-OPEN AFTER THE SUMMER BREAK. PLEASE CHECK THE GALLERY WEBSITE FOR FURTHER DETAILS.