LE NU MASCULIN

A GROUP SHOW
May 21 – July 9, 2022
extended until Saturday July 23, 2022

For his first thematic group exhibition, Galerie du Lendemain has chosen Le nu masculin (Male Nude).

Why this theme? Does it still have relevance in 2022? Is it still a source of inspiration for artists? Can they offer a new look at the naked male body, beyond all the iconic representations that art has already gave us? So many questions arise when we approach this essential theme which has precisely crossed the History of art.

Today, in an increasingly exhibitionist world, the male body is exhibited everywhere, notably saturating all social networks – but paradoxically, it has never been so censored, the current era, also bringing together a part of society that advocates a return to decency, prudishness and a new politically correct order, that doesn’t favor this excess of nudity.

For this unprecedented exhibition, Galerie du Lendemain therefore wished to give total artistic freedom to the artists – some of whom have already been exhibited on our walls – in each of their disciplines: photography, painting, drawing, collage…

In the past, over the centuries, a precise context, a kind of “pretext” was needed for art to “authorize” the representation of the naked man: scenes from mythology, antiquity, religious scenes then historical or even warlike and military scenes…; today, stripped of almost all its taboos – frontal nudity still being the “last frontier” remaining to be conquered artistically -, the naked man becomes a subject of militant commitment, like a new crusade, because artists assume to represent it without censoring themselves or their own works.

Some artists simply claim masculine beauty in their representations, their subject, their “muses”, displaying themselves as an object of desire, a rather reserved position until recently little to the woman depicted in art.

This new uninhibited vision, this new, freer look at the male nude offers both a source of undisguised pleasure for those who watch and no longer have to hide – as with times when this form of art was accompanied by shame and multiple taboos-, but also a reflection current on the place of the man with his naked body in the environment that the artist will have chosen: in the privacy of a room at dusk, outside, facing the wild or immense nature and abandoned, or still, searching for his own identity, faced with his fellow man, also naked, and perhaps even further, where art has no borders, in the most personal daydreams and the imagination the most exotic or strange, unique to each of these committed artists.