Right here is the definition of erotic, in accordance with 93-year-old artist Martha Edelheit. “It’s sensual, nonviolent, consensual, heat, inviting, generally humorous, witty, amusing. Erotica assumes shared affiliation, touching, stroking, licking, wanting, enjoying, exposing. It digresses, teases, laughs, arouses, with out harming.”
That is all additional laid out, to vivid impact, in “Erotic Metropolis,” a bunch exhibition of greater than 40 artists from the Fifties to the current, together with Joan Semmel, Carolee Schneemann, Paul Cadmus, and Tom of Finland, on view now by way of April 26 at Eric Firestone Gallery at 40 Nice Jones Avenue.
The present is curated by Edelheit, the pioneering feminist artist whose Nineteen Sixties works deal with feminine want, the physique, and pores and skin as a canvas for tattoo imagery. (A handful are on view within the present.) Imaginative, playful, transgressive, and extremely erotic at a time when that wasn’t acceptable for girls artists (“radical eroticism,” as artwork historian Rachel Intermediary later known as it), her oeuvre tacitly challenges social expectations of girls and conventional concepts of figurative portray and the nude.
Martha Edelheit, The Dinner Desk is Set for Dessert, 2015
Martha Edelheit in her studio
