The first Australian photographic exhibition of male figures through LGBTI eyes, The Unflinching Gaze: photo media & the male figure has opened at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, and is on display until 3 December 2017.
Curated by BRAG Director Richard Perram OAM, an openly gay man, The Unflinching Gaze: photo media & the male figure surveys how the male figure has been depicted by Australian and international artists in photo media over the last 140 years.
“The Unflinching Gaze is a unique opportunity for audiences in the Bathurst Region to access a world class photo-media exhibition,” says Richard Perram OAM. “The Unflinching Gaze not only deals with aesthetic concerns but also engages the community in a discussion around social issues.”
The exhibition includes two hundred photos and videos by 62 leading artists (24 Australian and 38 international) including iconic American artists Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, and avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson with a video portrait of Brad Pitt; European artists such as Eadweard Muybridge, and Baron Wilhelm Von Gloeden.
Historic and contemporary Australian artists including Beaufoy Merlin and Charles Bayliss, Max Dupain, Deborah Kelly, William Yang, Gary Carsley, Owen Leong and Liam Benson. Works have been sourced from Australian and international collections, including a major loan of 64 works from the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art, New York.
The exhibition includes historic and contemporary fine art photography and film, fashion photography, pop videos and homoerotic art. Images range from the beautiful to the banal to the confounding, bringing an unflinching gaze to how concepts of humanity and the male figure are intertwined and challenged.
Themes include the Pink Triangle, which deals with the persecution, torture and genocide of homosexuals in concentration camps during World War II to those in Chechnya today; and the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
The Unflinching Gaze: photo media & the male figure
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 70 – 78 Keppel Street, Bathurst
Exhibition continues to 3 December 2017
Free admission
View a sneak peak of the exhibition here. For more information, visit: www.bathurstart.com.au for details.
Images: Top – (L-R) Fergus Greer, Leigh Bowery, 1994; Owen Leong, Milk Teeth, 2014; and Dan Cullen & Charles Gornall, date unknown. Bottom – (L-R) The 9th Field Brigade (detail), 1938; Liam Benson, Coat Of Arms, 2009; Todd Fuller and Amy Hill, They’re Only Words (film still), 2009; and Robert Wilson, Brad Pitt, 2004 – courtesy of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and the respective artists.