Downtown, Los Angeles
Group Exhibition
Secret Gay Box
Tom of Finland FoundationPlease call to make a viewing appointment: +1 (213) 250-1685 Matthew Leifheit, Nathan Ritterpusch, Stuart Sandford, Justin Olerud, Robert Mapplethorpe, Joseph La Piana, Mike Kuchar, Don Joint, Levi Jackman Foster, Hossein Edalatkhah, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Paul Cadmus, Patrick Angus, Andy Warhol, Jose Gonzalo Garcia Munoz John Wolf Fine Art is pleased to present Secret Gay Box, an exhibition at the Tom of Finland Foundation. Secret Gay Box creates a dialogue with the work of Tom of Finland, which expresses hidden desires as embodied through the homoerotic male form. From intimate Polaroids documenting the obsession of a lover, to more overtly illicit drawings by Mike Kuchar – who signed his erotic works “Mike” without a surname and considered the practice to be his “little secret career” – works on view embody queerness in its most subtle and most overt forms. Secret Gay Box illustrates what Eve Sedgwick has coined texxture – “the kind of texture that is dense with offered information about how, substantially, historically, materiality, it came into being.” Known for his use of unconventional space, Los Angeles-based advisor John Wolf has given works new meaning by placing them in unusual contexts, such as in his recent exhibition Human Condition, which took place in an abandoned hospital in Los Angeles. For Secret Gay Box, Wolf has partnered with the Tom of Finland Foundation in Echo Park, where art hides in plain sight. Like Wolf’s own childhood, Tom of Finland’s practice began in an all-too-familiar closeted secret world, where his identity was hidden from his community and his artwork was created as means of self-expression. Secret Gay Box is a fluctuating document of a person’s individuality: it is a time capsule and it is also a time machine. It is the collision point for a variety of contradictory impulses; stranger and family member; individual and collective. John Wolf is a global art advisor based in Los Angeles. He founded John Wolf Art Advisory & Brokerage in 2009 to assist private collectors, institutions, and corporations in creating outstanding collections of contemporary art. He has spoken on panels at Art Miami, Art Silicon Valley, and is on the council at LACMA. He received his BBA in International Business and Art History from Baylor University. Outside of traditional art advisory and brokerage, John Wolf also curates museum- quality exhibitions at various host locations, including contemporary art galleries, vacant storefronts and hotel lobbies. Nomadic in nature, the curatorial efforts of John Wolf Art Advisory reflect a larger effort to reinvigorate the art market by offering refreshing perspectives for the contextualization of these works. Wolf strives to build relationships with museums, galleries, artists and fellow advisors to provide the best to recommendations for strategic, curatorial-based acquisitions. Tom of Finland Foundation is a nonprofit organization and Educational Archive, cofounded by Tom of Finland and Durk Dehner in 1984. It is supported by donations from the public, fundraising events, dues from its membership programs and commercial applications of Tom’s art. Tom of Finland Foundation’s mission is to preserve, protect and promote the works of Tom of Finland and his fellow erotic artists. The Permanent Collection houses more than 1,500 original works by Tom, and another 2,000 works by hundreds of other artists, and the archives, with well over 100,000 images, documents, and records, together comprise the world’s largest repository of erotic art. Tom House is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument where Tom of Finland Foundation has operated since 1984.