by Anne Gabriel
There is a new crop of contemporary moody and emotional male portraiture emerging from the folds and I’m loving it.
Portraiture—whether in paintings depicting kings, battlefields, sexcapades, emotion or in sculpture showing beauty, intelligence, musculature–depicting “maleness” and the traditional tropes surrounding that has been a prominent theme throughout art history. We all have history books with photos of David and have seen Van Gogh’s self-portraits enough times that if we threw darts at it with our eyes closed we’d all be able to hit his nose, but male portraiture centered on the vulnerability of men in their intimate private spaces is far less common and is now front and center in three recent exhibitions.
The Gustave Caillebotte show, Painting Men—which opened at the Getty Center in February–is smack dab within the zeitgeist and provides a link and gateway to the current emerging themes in contemporary male portraiture. Although Caillebotte is an impressionist painter and not a contemporary artist, Caillebotte’s portraits of men (his brother and his bachelor friends) are painted absent females and are of intimate male-with-male settings, shying away from depictions of power and typical masculine norms at the time.
Two contemporary shows follow suit, Zaam Arif at Night Gallery paints loose, brushy, moody hued portraits of men in their personal interior settings (mostly alone)—sleeping on a couch, looking in a full length mirror (referencing Schiele), or standing in a doorway smoking while books are strewn about on the floor. Much like Caillebotte’s paintings, these are paintings of boring, pedestrian lives of men.
Equally intimate—albeit with far more skin—is Kyle Dunns’s exhibition at Vielmetter which showcases men in private spaces and in various states of nudity. These paintings are about men just “being” while being nude—sitting on a cabinet, walking down stairs, laying under a raised potted plant, laying with a lover.
I wholly approve and I can’t wait for more.
Image: Zaam Arif, Collected Fictions, 2025, Courtesy of the Artist and Night Gallery.