Images is the first retrospective dedicated to the American artist Larry Stanton (1947–1984), which follows the success of the publication Larry Stanton. Think of Me Where It Thunders, published by APARTAMENTO, and the special project in collaboration with ACNE Studio and Visual AIDS New York City. The exhibition, staged in partnership with the artist’s Estate, consists of a rich body of work combining sketches, drawings on paper, oil paintings, slides and videos, many of which are on public display for the first time since their preview in Venice during the 59th International Art Exhibition – Venice Biennale.
Before dying prematurely of AIDS in 1984 at the age of thirty-seven, Stanton had begun to make a name for himself on the New York queer art scene of the 1960s by joining a group of intellectuals, writers and artists such as David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Isherwood. Stanton developed his artistic poetics around portraiture, drawing the faces of friends, family, companions and lovers. He often found his models among the young men who crowded the clubs and night streets of Manhattan.
In Stanton’s first solo gallery exhibition, a selection of small sketches is exhibited for the first time, along with loose sheets from the notebooks the artist carried with him wherever he went, from bars to friends’ flats. He routinely wandered around Greenwich Village, where his studio was located, a cramped space filled with canvases, photographs and art books, portraying its inhabitants almost frantically.
The encounters, conversations and travels are recounted in the exhibition through a selection of photographs from Lambert’s archive and a series of Super 8 videos made by the artist on Fire Island between 1975 and 1979. The videos, like the photographs on display, are not only a rare testimony to the queer scene on Fire Island over those summers but also a subjective look at the more intimate and private aspect of the friendship between Stanton and Hockney. And it is Hockney himself who features in the most remarkable unreleased video in the exhibition, which documents the artist as he works on his Paper Pools series at the Ken Tyler workshop in 1978.
