Berlin Gallery Weekend 2025 arrives this May with renewed creative energy, reaffirming the city’s position as a global nexus for contemporary art. Against the backdrop of Berlin’s ever-evolving cultural landscape, and amid financial cuts affecting many programmes that have made the city attractive for artists in the first place, Gallery Weekend offers a moment of shared focus.

Despite the rising costs and perennial buzz about other cities vying to be the 'New Berlin,' BGW director Antonia Ruder cuts through the noise: 'I would say that what matters is the density of the artists living here. International stars such as Monica Bonvicini, Anne Imhof, and Olafur Eliasson – all of whom are participating this year – live and work here.' It’s this critical mass of creative minds that continues to define Berlin’s gravitational pull. Now in her second year at the helm, Ruder is on a mission to further professionalise the much-emulated format first launched by Berlin gallerists over two decades ago. This year, that vision takes shape through a new podcast pairing Berlin’s art writers with the artists generating buzz, and a growing network of VIP ambassadors aimed at drawing more visitors to the city – particularly from this year’s target region: Asia.

This year, alongside more than 50 participating galleries, West Berlin’s storied luxury department store KaDeWe is presenting a 24/7 pop-up exhibition in its display windows, bringing contemporary art to the high-volume footfall of the high-street, with Berlin-based artists including Saâdane Afif, Karin Sander, or Alexandra Bircken, to name a few. Meanwhile, Berlin’s institutions are stepping up with unmissable exhibitions—most notably a double-header Yoko Ono retrospective split between the Neue Nationalgalerie and Gropius Bau. On Friday, May 2, in a night that’s already sold out, Berlin fixture and performer Peaches will restage Ono’s legendary Cut Piece, adding a charged, contemporary layer to the historic work.

As the first project under Hamburger Bahnhof’s new partnership with the Chanel Culture Fund, Klára Hosnedlová’s embrace takes over the museum’s vast hall with unapologetic scale and style, transforming it into a hauntingly surreal environment. On view until October 26, 2025, the installation features nine-metre-high woven tapestries, embroidered sculptural panels, cast-glass forms, concrete slabs, and site-specific objects arranged in theatrical, almost sacred configurations. Drawing from Brutalist architecture and the domestic aesthetics of post-Soviet interiors, Hosnedlová explores the fragility of utopia, the weight of memory, and the textures of survival. Hosnedlová‘s first institutional show encapsulates Chanel Commission’s mission: backing high-impact, materially rich work that pushes boundaries.

Amongst the highlights on the official program is Berlin’s newest art space, Die Tankstelle, opening its doors in a restored 1950s gas station in Schöneberg—now home to a collaboration between Pace Gallery and Galerie Judin (the space also includes a café-bookshop by Die ZEIT.) Its inaugural programming sets a bold tone: Pace presents Reverse Alchemy, featuring works on paper by Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Nava. The exhibition explores the concept of transforming high art back into raw, primal expression – a nod to Dubuffet’s art brut ethos. Simultaneously, Galerie Judin unveils a Tom of Finland retrospective, spotlighting the artist’s iconic, hyper-stylised depictions of queer masculinity.

Navigating over 50 galleries during Berlin Gallery Weekend is thrilling but demanding. With shows spread from Schöneberg’s sleek spaces to Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg’s hidden gems, the challenge lies in both logistics and curation. Notably, many highlights come courtesy of women and women-identifying artists. Anne Imhof returns to Galerie Buchholz with Cold Hope, a series of large paintings based on film stills, digitally manipulated and layered with moiré effects. Developed alongside her recent blockbuster New York performance DOOM: House of Hope—a sprawling, operatic piece blending choreography, sound, and live action in shifting tableaux—the show translates her visceral, time-based practice into a more abstract, contemplative realm.

Marianna Simnett presents Charades at Galerie Société—a multi-layered exhibition exploring ritual, and performative deception. The show features new video works, sculptures, and oil paintings, a medium that the artist has only recently started working with, that blur the line between masquerade and myth. Central to the exhibition is Leda Was a Swan, a striking video piece reimagining the ancient tale of Zeus and Leda through a contemporary feminist lens. With her signature mix of the grotesque and the theatrical, Simnett confronts societal norms and bodily politics.

For its Gallery Weekend debut, NOME presents UNCENSORED by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, following her 2024 solo show at LAS. Blending video, sound, drawing, and sculpture, her work confronts cultural repression and emotional avoidance. Using elements of horror and surrealism, Brathwaite-Shirley invites viewers into raw, disquieting encounters.

Sprüth Magers unveils Retinal Rivalry, a cinematic tour de force by Cyprien Gaillard. Shot in razor-sharp ultra-HD 3D at 120 frames per second, the film plunges viewers into a disorienting, almost hallucinatory experience. From the dizzying excess of Oktoberfest’s final hours to the ghostly remnants of Roman Cologne, Gaillard collapses time and space into a hypnotic meditation on urban spectacle, decay, and the haunting persistence of history. It’s a definitive must-see, no matter how long the queues that are likely to form outside the space.

Venturing beyond the official Gallery Weekend program is both inevitable and deeply rewarding. In Mitte, Mountains gallery presents Luftbrücke, a moving solo exhibition dedicated to the late Filipino artist David Medalla. Curated with his partner Adam Nankervis, the show spans Medalla’s iconic Bubble Machines, his participatory piece A Stitch in Time, neon sculptures, rare paintings, and archival materials. Anchored by his 1997–98 DAAD residency in Berlin, Luftbrücke connects Medalla’s nomadic, communal practice with the city’s layered histories—art as both personal journey and collective lifeline. It’s a fitting tribute in a city that, despite recurring declarations of its demise, continues to lure artists with its promise of reinvention and resonance.

Berlin Gallery Weekend is 2- 4 May 2025

Tom of Finland’s libidinally charged illustrations of muscled-up men in various states of embrace – and often clad in skin-tight leather or denim – have seen the Finnish artist (born Touko Laaksonen), become one of queer art’s most distinctive voices. First appearing in publications like Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial in the 1950s, his stylised drawings would – as his eponymous Los Angeles-based foundation describes – ‘fuel both the sexual fantasies and the aesthetics of gay men'.

Glenn Martens, the Belgian creative director of Italian fashion label Diesel, has forged a deep-rooted relationship with the Tom of Finland Foundation and its president Durk Dehner, a friend and lover of Laaksonen, who set up the foundation with him in 1984 (the artist would die in 1991, with Dehner becoming the guardian of his legacy). ‘[His work] seemed to affect me in a way that art never had before, an emotional way,’ Dehner told Wallpaper* on the occasion of Diesel’s ‘AllTogether’ exhibition in Venice in 2022, which combined Tom of Finland’s illustrations with the work of other erotic artists. ‘There was something in it that made it feel like he had done these pictures for us, for gay boys. That was important in a world where nothing felt like it was made for you,’ he said.

Diesel takes Tom of Finland to Tokyo

Now, a new exhibition of Tom of Finland’s work is being hosted in the Diesel Art Gallery in Tokyo, part of the brand’s vast flagship store in the buzzing Shibuya district. Titled ‘Forty Years of Pride’, the display marks a rare opportunity to see Tom of Finland exhibited in Japan and features the artist’s works both in colour and black and white, some of which are for sale. The former includes the bright red of a Santa costume (worn by a typically gleaming Adonis with just a Christmas stocking for modesty); the latter, men in wipe-clean black leather boots and chaps. Diesel says the exhibition ‘amplifies the message of freedom of expression, sexuality and individualism’ at the heart of Tom of Finland’s oeuvre.

Alongside the show, there is a VR experience that allows viewers to be transported to Tom House, the artist’s former Los Angeles residence which now serves as a community hub and gallery space, alongside hosting artists in residence who explore erotic themes in their practices. 'Present-day artists are inspired by the generation before, they feed off each other,’ Dehner previously told Wallpaper*. ‘At the foundation, we promote the present and future, and protect the past. That’s really what creates community and family, because family isn’t just who’s alive today – it’s where you come from, all the people came before.’

The exhibition offers a final opportunity to shop Martens’ Pride collection for Diesel, which is the third to be made in collaboration with the Tom of Finland Foundation. The collection also celebrates artists Stuart Sandford, Suzanne Shifflett, Tank, the Hun, Valentine and Henning von Berg, who are each linked to the Foundation. The boldly illustrated pieces, some in playful trompe o’eil, span T-shirts, sweaters and the requisite jockstrap. The collection’s launch last month coincided with the Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival, held this year in Berlin’s Berghain nightclub, supported by Diesel.

‘Forty Years Of Pride’ runs at the Diesel Art Gallery in the Diesel store in Shibuya, Tokyo from until August 14, 2024.

The Diesel x Tom of Finland Foundation Pride collection is available from Diesel’s website.

diesel.comtomoffinland.org

A playful hyperreality appealed to both Beryl Cook (1926-2008) and Tom of Finland (1920-1991), whose work in the 20th century celebrated pleasure for its own sake. Despite obvious differences between the two artists – the UK’s Cook, with her larger-than-life women cavorting in often quintessentially British settings; and Tom of Finland (aka Touko Laaksonen), who lived in both Finland and the US, and his depictions of a queer masculinity – they are linked by their consideration of class, gender and sexuality.

Now, the two are being considered side by side in a London art exhibition at Studio Voltaire, looking at both their work and the impact it had on a wider audience. Here, curator Nicola Wright tells us what unites them.

Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland at Studio Voltaire

Wallpaper: Can you tell us why you wanted to unite these artists and draw parallels between their work?

Nicola Wright: Fundamentally, both Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland were artists who prioritised pleasure in their works and denied shame.

Though Tom of Finland’s work [preserved and celebrated by the Tom of Finland Foundation] was heavily based in fantasy, and designed to arouse, the artist aimed to produce images of gay men that counteracted the atmosphere of oppression and stereotypes of effeminacy he had grown up with. In contrast, Tom’s drawings present gay men as strong, happy, sexual – and public.

If Tom of Finland’s works are explicitly sexual, Cook is equally interested in sensual experience and excess, but she locates it in the convivial atmosphere of cafés, hen parties, with female protagonists such as her Lady of Marseille (c.1990).

W*: In both artists’ work, the body takes on larger-than-life personas. How do they differ in the ways they portray this celebration of the body?

NW: Tom of Finland came to define a lexicon of queer masculine archetypes through his work. Although the artist adhered to a specific ideal in his depictions of men – tight narrow waists, broad shoulders, jutting jaws and bulging crotches – he exaggerated their attributes to heroic proportions and charged them with an explicit homoeroticism. In doing so, his works subverted heteronormative tropes of masculinity and authority, indelibly changing how gay men could be seen, and see themselves.

Cook’s images of larger women are in some ways the opposite of Tom’s men, but [the artists] share a way of hyperrealising the body that is visually powerful. [With Cook] heightening the details of their bodies, dress and expressions, the women in her works are both class-coded and engage with female-oriented forms of camp. Though playful, Cook’s women resist ‘polite’ femininity, fully and unapologetically taking up space. By prioritising and celebrating bigger bodies, Cook points to wider connotations related to the intersection of body size, gender and class.

W*: What surprised you when viewing and considering these works together?

NW: The initial impulse to pair the two came from this sense that they shared a way of exaggerating bodies and an eye for excess. Numerous other ties became clear as we researched the show: their use of commercial platforms and methods of reproduction to circulate their works, the way both speak to ideas of class and taste.

Their works also revealed more direct thematic lines – for example, Cook’s role in documenting queer life in works such as Lockyer Tavern (c.1974) and ‘Bangs’ Disco (1977). (Bangs was ‘London’s first gay superclub’ – after several permutations it emerged as the renowned G-A-Y nightclub.)

Both [artists] had respectively large fandoms, whom they cared about deeply: the exhibition includes some of Cook’s fan mail, which she always answered. Poignantly, the exhibition also includes some of Tom’s collected fan mail stamps. Fearing that his correspondence could ‘out’ his followers should it fall into the wrong hands, he destroyed the letters, keeping only the stamps as a memento.

‘Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland’ at Studio Voltaire, London, until 25 August 2024

studiovoltaire.org

On Tom of Finland Day – what would have been Tom of Finland’s 103rd birthday (8 May 2023) – we’re taking the opportunity to reflect on the iconoclastic artist’s creative and mission-driven legacy, whose significance has continued to deepen, especially in light of the current political and social climes.

Born Tuoko Laaksonen in Kaarina, Finland (1920-1991), Tom of Finland’s homoerotic artworks, often characterised by muscly men, clad in skin-tight leather and proudly showing off their bulges (both large and XXL) need no introduction. The prominence of his titillating oeuvre in popular culture today is largely down to the work of the Tom of Finland Foundation, which was founded in 1984 by the artist and his friend Duke Dehner, who still presides over it today. 

In addition to securing and preserving the legitimacy of Tom’s work in the art world for almost four decades, the foundation now also preserves complementary erotic art from other artists of all genders and orientations as part of its growing permanent collection (we looked in on its 2022 group show, ‘AllTogether’, in Venice).

Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival 2023, Berlin

It’s a mission certainly worth protecting and one that continues to gain long overdue recognition. The Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival 2023 opens in Berlin this week (12 – 14 May), before travelling to London and Los Angeles in July and October 2023 respectively. Titled ‘Global Sexual’, the festival promises to bring together artists, galleries and patrons in a social and friendly setting where they can socialise, and buy and sell work.

‘It's the perfect moment in time to remember an artist who drew a world that we all wanted to live in – and we did – and took it to the streets,' says SR Sharp, the foundation's chief experience officer. 'Not only did he give us a strong, positive identity, he altered the way we were perceived by society. From porn shops to galleries to museum walls, Tom's work forms a coalition of those who want to inhabit a globe where humans can thrive, unshackled from shame.'

‘Bold Journey’ at Kiasma, Finland

The event comes hot on the heels of the opening of ‘Bold Journey’ (until 29 October 2023), a retrospective of Tom’s work at the Kiasma museum of contemporary art in Finland that is structured around his biography and the characters he created.

Spanning his six-decade career, the exhibition showcases childhood drawings, a trove of archive material and even a virtual tour of Tom’s house in Los Angeles, where he wintered for the last decade of his life. At the preview opening for the show, Dehner was presented with the Order of the Lion of Finland, acknowledging his work in preserving and promoting one of the country’s most foremost artists.

‘The friendship and collaboration between the iconic Tom of Finland… and Durk Dehner has had a huge impact on how the global gay community has become proud of their identity,’ said Paula Parviainen, ambassador for culture and creative industries, Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. She went on to mention Dehner’s ‘great achievement in promoting human rights and personal freedoms’.

‘Tom of Finland: Bold Journey’ is now on view at Kiasma, Finland, until 29 October, kiasma.fi 

Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival 2023: ‘GlobalSexual’, 12 – 14 May, prideART at The Knast, Söhtstraße 7, 12203 Berlin, Germany, tomoffinland.org

In the decade before his death, Finland-born Touko Laaksonen (1920 – 1991) – best known by the artistic pseudonym Tom of Finland – lived in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighbourhood, where he spent the final years of his life adding to his prolific catalogue of sexually liberated, libidinally charged illustrations of beefed-up men, which first appeared in Bob Mizer’s homoerotic magazine Physique Pictorial in the 1950s. 

The Echo Park home – now owned by the Tom of Finland Foundation, which the artist founded with friend, lover, and business partner Durk Dehner in 1984 – is known as ‘Tom House’ and has become an elysium for queer and erotic artists from around the world, who make a pilgrimage to the Los Angeles address to hone their craft in a series of residencies. As such, Tom House’s 14 rooms claim more than 3,500 works of erotic art and over 100,000 pieces of ephemera, memorabilia and objects from both Tom himself and those who have called the property home over the years – a fittingly expansive collection for the artist’s own outsized legacy.

This past weekend, thousands of miles away in the backstreets of Venice’s northern Cannaregio district, a characteristically leather-clad Dehner – who remains president of the Tom of Finland Foundation – found himself back in Tom House’s living room, albeit a recreation created for the foundation’s new group exhibition ‘AllTogether’ at Studio Cannaregio (23 April – 26 June 2022), supported by Italian fashion label Diesel and curated in association with Paris’ The Community gallery. Around Dehner, objects capture the home’s heady mix of the erotic and domestic: a nude photograph of a man in the reflection of a bathroom mirror, a plastic phallus, mugs, figurines, a roll-along drinks trolley with a single bottle of Tom of Finland-branded vodka on top.

In the decade before his death, Finland-born Touko Laaksonen (1920 – 1991) – best known by the artistic pseudonym Tom of Finland – lived in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighbourhood, where he spent the final years of his life adding to his prolific catalogue of sexually liberated, libidinally charged illustrations of beefed-up men, which first appeared in Bob Mizer’s homoerotic magazine Physique Pictorial in the 1950s. 

The Echo Park home – now owned by the Tom of Finland Foundation, which the artist founded with friend, lover, and business partner Durk Dehner in 1984 – is known as ‘Tom House’ and has become an elysium for queer and erotic artists from around the world, who make a pilgrimage to the Los Angeles address to hone their craft in a series of residencies. As such, Tom House’s 14 rooms claim more than 3,500 works of erotic art and over 100,000 pieces of ephemera, memorabilia and objects from both Tom himself and those who have called the property home over the years – a fittingly expansive collection for the artist’s own outsized legacy.

This past weekend, thousands of miles away in the backstreets of Venice’s northern Cannaregio district, a characteristically leather-clad Dehner – who remains president of the Tom of Finland Foundation – found himself back in Tom House’s living room, albeit a recreation created for the foundation’s new group exhibition ‘AllTogether’ at Studio Cannaregio (23 April – 26 June 2022), supported by Italian fashion label Diesel and curated in association with Paris’ The Community gallery. Around Dehner, objects capture the home’s heady mix of the erotic and domestic: a nude photograph of a man in the reflection of a bathroom mirror, a plastic phallus, mugs, figurines, a roll-along drinks trolley with a single bottle of Tom of Finland-branded vodka on top.

‘Tom was creating work in the 1950s, and homosexuality was outlawed [in Finland] until 1971. We went through a lot – the fact is, when the foundation got started, Aids came about and so we had to take the back seat and take care of our own in order to be able to survive all these years. The foundation was discriminated against for grants, but I think now society is willing to see what our contribution is. These works are something to celebrate and enjoy, to pleasure oneself.’

What is notable about ‘AllTogether’ is Tom’s marathon-like cultural endurance, which has inspired whole generations of queer artists to embrace the erotic in their own life and work (as well as spawning various exhibitions, books, even a 2017 feature film). Like Dehner himself – in 1976, while a young man in his twenties, he encountered one of Tom’s illustrations in the Spike bar, New York. Immediately struck, he tore the poster from the wall and asked a friend – the artist Dom Orejudos, aka Etienne, whose work also appears in the exhibition – for Tom’s address, later writing him an admiring ‘fan letter’ (their relationship would see them meet in Los Angeles in 1977).

‘It seemed to affect me in a way that art never had before, an emotional way. There was something in it that made it feel like he had done these pictures for us, for gay boys. That was important in a world where nothing felt like it was made for you.’

Several years later, in a small town outside of Bruges, Belgium, a young Glenn Martens – the creative director of exhibition partner Diesel, who also helms Belgium-based label Y/Project – found a similar feeling of belonging in one of Tom’s illustrations, joining a long line of fashion designers who have noted the influence, both implicit and explicit, of the artist on their own work. (Clothes were surprisingly important to Tom, particularly the erotic charge of leather and denim – Dehner recounts that he would say ‘his men look so much more sexy in clothes than they do naked’.)

‘Tom of Finland is one of those artists that you encounter who helps you understand your sexuality, your place in society,’ says Martens, who also came to Venice for the opening. ‘I grew up in a very provincial town where there was no gay world, but thanks to symbols like this, you also start accepting that actually it’s fine to be who you are.’ 

Such stories are pervasive in the exhibition itself, which connects threads of artists from around the world who have been drawn into Tom’s orbit, many of whom undertook stints at Tom House – American filmmaker and photographer Matt Lambert, Spanish illustrator Silvia Prada, and German photographer Florian Hetz among them. Some works in ‘AllTogether’ are unabashedly, exuberantly sexual – ejaculating penises, assholes exposed to the air, copulating groups of men – others more reserved, hovering on singular body parts, or darkly-lit moments of embrace.

Dehner says it is about an appreciation of sexuality, in all its forms. ‘You don’t have to be pounding somebody to appreciate your own sexuality. It can also be about how you view other people. We’re hoping that people will relax and enjoy their own sexual desires by seeing them expressed in these ways.’ 

In keeping with this mood, a small capsule collection of clothing from Martens and Diesel will be adorned with various works from the exhibition – from a T-shirt to a jockstrap. ‘It’s all about the art, so we didn’t design too much,’ says Martens. ‘It’s for Pride Month, and I think a lot of brands just are trying to market for a minority when they do that. But we want to think about a community that’s still persecuted, and to actually give back and highlight these artists’ work. I always hope people who wear my clothes feel sexy and empowered, to live life to its fullest.’

Dehner says the main challenge of the exhibition was how to narrow down the foundation’s vast collection; as such, a subsequent iteration of ‘AllTogether’ will open at Paris’ The Community Centre gallery next month, featuring a new set of artworks. It means those that end up in the two exhibitions have special emotional resonance to Dehner and the foundation. On a walkthrough, he pauses in front of an illustration of a battered pair of black leather boots, from 2006. The artist is Carrington Galen – known in his work simply as ‘Dylan’ – a close friend of Tom House who created its notorious ‘Pleasure Park’ gardens, a winding trail of verdant pathways named after one of Tom’s cruising comics. In 2016, after having been diagnosed with incurable cancer, Galen chose to pass away at the house he had given his life to, in the gardens he helped to create. Dehner says he died as the sun was setting, surrounded by his Tom of Finland community.

Later that evening in Venice, after dark, a crowd of people – each in some way related to the foundation, some dressed from the pages of Tom’s work – came together to celebrate the exhibition’s opening (others pooled the narrow street outside, waiting to get in). In the gallery’s courtyard, a bar had been erected; the artist Silvia Prada played at a DJ booth underneath a sign which read ‘Pleasure Park’. In keeping with Dehner’s desires, pleasure-seeking was indeed the mood: partygoers danced, chatted, drank Tom of Finland vodka. Inside, the Tom House living room filled with people, sprawled on chairs and deep in conversation – a new generation of the Tom of Finland family, gathered from around the world. 

‘Present-day artists are inspired by the generation before, they feed off each other,’ Dehner said earlier in the day. ‘At the foundation, we promote the present and future, and protect the past. That’s really what creates community and family, because family isn’t just who’s alive today – it’s where you come from, all the people came before.’

INFORMATION
‘AllTogether’ by Tom of Finland Foundation and The Community supported by Diesel is on view at Studio Cannaregio, Venice until 26 June 2022.

‘AllTogether’ will also run at The Community Centre, Paris from 8 June 2022 until 26 June 2022.  

tomoffinland.org
diesel.com
thecommunity.io

Last year, Tom of Finland turned 100. The trailblazing cultural icon (born Touko Laaksonen, 1920-1991), created work that simultaneously dropped jaws, squared up to the stagnant views of 20th-century society, and sang an ode to queer liberation. 

In his heroic homoerotic drawings – starring hyper-masculine hunks, clad in uniforms or leather gear, all bulging muscles and members – he fearlessly confronted a system that denied freedom, legality, and basic rights to the gay community. 

To mark the artist’s centenary, Fotografiska in collaboration with the Tom of Finland Foundation produced ‘The Darkroom’, a deep-dive into the artist's life and work. Now on view at Fotografiska’s New York outpost, the show offers an intimate view of a little-known, and forcibly concealed, facet of Tom of Finland’s process: his reference photography. 

‘The Darkroom’ consists of never-before-exhibited portraits captured as source material for Tom of Finland’s famed drawings. Among the photographs are portraits of friends and partners – including those Tom of Finland and Robert Mapplethorpe took of each other – that were confined to his home studio and darkroom for years, with much of the correspondence between the artist and his subjects destroyed due to the illegality of homosexuality at the time. To have practiced this process in plain sight would have risked a prison sentence.

‘Being aware of what society had denied homosexuals, Tom went about creating the archetype of masculine homosexuals who participate freely together in sex – a decree from Nature herself, says Durk Dehner, president and co-founder of the Tom of Finland Foundation, created in 1984. ‘Men knew instinctively that Tom drew with them in mind. Tom’s motives were nurturing, parental. He wanted men to grow up healthy and strong – in body and mind. He wanted to break the old cycles of self-doubt.’ 

Though the Tom of Finland Foundation’s original goal was to preserve the artist’s vast catalogue of work, it has since evolved into something of far greater magnitude. It now seeks to offer a haven for all erotic art against rampant discrimination. Today, the foundation is committed to educating the public on the cultural merits of erotic art and promoting more inclusive and tolerant attitudes towards sexuality. 

And the show doesn’t end on the gallery walls. Another key feature can be found lining the hallway and bathroom of Fotografiska New York, a collaboration between Tom of Finland Foundation and Brooklyn-based wallpaper brand Flavor Paper. 

The wallpaper was originally showcased in the 2019 Wallpaper* Handmade X exhibition with Michael Reynolds + Hoffman Creative. The team have now taken their Tom of Finland TAME and XXX designs up a gear, creating an exclusive version for the Fotografiska show in spicy red, available for sale at the museum's physical and online shop. 

The darkroom represents Tom of Finland’s photographic process. It is also a potent symbol for the confinement and persecution of LGBTQ+ people that many continue to face. 

The show is a portrait of an artist who offered those who saw his work the confidence to live with pride, grab oppression by the horns, and walk, with zest, out from the darkroom.

INFORMATION
Tom of Finland: ’The Darkroom’, until 20 August, 2021, Fotografiska New York. fotografiska.com
tomoffinland.org

On a palm tree-lined street in Echo Park, an increasingly hip neighbourhood near downtown Los Angeles, you’ll find a beautifully preserved craftsman house from 1910. Apart from the 12ft hedges that run across the front of the property, little would seem to distinguish the residence from its well-kept neighbours. Step inside, however, and a different world comes into view. 

Hundreds of works of erotic art spread across virtually all the 17 rooms in the house, as well as its backyard patio and terraced gardens. They range from a sculpted phallus called Disco Boy, made of tiny squares of mirrored glass, to a bird feeder fitted with delicately hand-painted scenes of bondage and discipline.

A working fountain incorporating a urinal has been constructed in the backyard, while faux frescoes on the first and second floor ceilings present a veritable orgy of men pleasuring themselves and one another. 

The house is the headquarters of the Tom of Finland Foundation, an organisation devoted to preserving the legacy of the most influential homoerotic artist of the 20th century. Across a career that spanned nearly 50 years, Tom created thousands of drawings of muscle-bound, bulgingly priapic sailors, soldiers, cops, cowboys, bikers and lifeguards. His pictures delight in the sheen of leather boots and motorcycle jackets and in the snug fit of sailor trousers and muscle shirts. 

The male figures wearing those boots and trousers engage in exuberant acts of sexual exchange, often leaning toward fetishism and light bondage. For all their explicitness, Tom’s drawings remain lodged within a fantasy world of illustration where every guy is impossibly well-endowed and endlessly open to the next erotic adventure.

The Tom of Finland house is also the private residence of Durk Dehner and SR Sharp, a couple who serve as the foundation’s president and vice president, respectively. Dehner, a close friend, model and muse for Tom of Finland, co-founded the organisation with the artist in 1984. Originally conceived as a means to promote Tom’s work and preserve his legacy, the foundation eventually expanded to support a wide range of erotic art – by both men and women – through exhibitions, life-drawing classes, erotic art fairs and an artist-in-residence programme. 

The foundation’s early years coincided with the height of the Aids epidemic in America. Artists concerned that their work would be forgotten or destroyed after their deaths bequeathed it to the foundation knowing it would be archived and lovingly preserved. The foundation now possesses a permanent collection of approximately 3,500 works, some 150 of which are displayed in the home at any one time, often in thematic exhibitions curated by Sharp and Dehner. In addition, original drawings by Tom, as well as numerous reproductions and monumental blow-ups of his work, appear throughout the house and grounds.

The artist, born Touko Laaksonen, gained his professional moniker in 1957, when his drawings first appeared in the American magazine Physique Pictorial. The magazine’s photographer/publisher, Bob Mizer, felt the artist’s foreign name would be too difficult for readers to pronounce or remember so he dubbed him ‘Tom of Finland’. 

During the 1980s, Tom split his time between Helsinki and Los Angeles, ultimately basing himself entirely at the house in Echo Park (Dehner had purchased the home with friends). Tom’s studio/ bedroom in the converted attic has been preserved  much as the artist left it, with leather pillowcases on the bed and pencils and chalk at the drafting table. Also displayed in the room are Tom’s motorcycle jacket, boots and a selection of his beloved uniforms, including those of a Finnish soldier, an American sailor, a German police officer and a Canadian Mountie. 

While unapologetically pornographic, Tom’s work has increasingly been recognised as high art. The permanent collections of both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art include drawings by the artist and, this past June, a selection of Tom’s work was shown (and sold) at Art Basel, the most prestigious international art fair. In 2013, working closely with the foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles presented a show featuring Tom’s drawings and collages alongside photographs by Mizer from Physique Pictorial. The exhibition’s introductory text described Tom of Finland as ‘the creator of some of the most iconic and readily recognisable images of post-war homomasculinity’ (almost certainly marking that word’s official debut in the museum).

Alongside its elevation by the art world, Tom’s work has increasingly entered mainstream culture. In September of this year, the Finnish postal service released stamps in honour of the artist, one of which features a drawing of a naked man’s shapely buttocks and spread legs. According to Sharp, these are ‘the first homoerotic postage stamps in the world’. The nomination of Tom for this honour was made by the foundation, which also worked on a companion show, currently on display at the Finnish Postal Museum in Tampere. Titled ‘Sealed with a Secret: Correspondence of Tom of Finland’, the show mines the artist’s trove of letters and photographs to chart his life and work.

Tom’s influence extends not only to other erotic artists but also to the development of gay culture across the second half of the 20th century. His drawings have inspired countless viewers not just to hit the gym or don a biker cap but also to imagine an alternative version of homosexuality. As Sharp puts it, ‘when Tom’s work first appeared in the 1950s, it defied the dominant image of gay men as sissies, fairies and pansies’. Tom’s drawings offered a ‘homo-masculine’ ideal that spoke not only to the desires but also to the personal aspirations of his viewing audience. Some admirers of Tom’s art even had their trousers tailored to fit more like those of the men in the drawings, then sent photographs of themselves wearing the refashioned attire to the artist. Such photographs may now be found in the correspondence archive held by the foundation.

And yet, what may finally be most inspiring about the Tom of Finland house is the way in which the artist’s relentlessly butch aesthetic mingles with quite different styles of décor and domesticity. That aforementioned mirrored phallus (made by the artist Douglas Holtquist) sits beneath an art nouveau crystal chandelier from 1913. A bust of a bearded leatherman in the kitchen turns out, on closer inspection, to be a ceramic jar (the man’s biker cap doubles as a removable lid) with a base bearing the inscription ‘tuff cookie’. And a quilt spread across a guest room bed features two male nudes – each intricately composed of geometric patches of blue, white and black fabric – enjoying a moment of shared self-gratification. 

Rather than appearing kitsch, such objects might be seen as an example of camp at its most generous. In her 1964 notes on that subject, Susan Sontag wrote that ‘people who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp”, they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.’

And it was, finally, a feeling of tenderness that seemed most to pervade the house, a tenderness towards art, towards sexuality and towards those seeking to combine the two. A rotating cast of characters lives in the house along with Sharp and Dehner, including artists, volunteers and fellow foundation members. A free-form, communal spirit infuses domestic life there. At the moment, a 22-year-old Vietnamese body modification performance artist known professionally as Miss Daphne Von Rey is in residence there along with an Australian writer-in-residence who is helping prepare an application for the house to be designated a historical-cultural monument (HCM) by the city of Los Angeles. Dehner estimates that some 100 artists and other creative souls have lived in the house at one point or another over the last two decades.

According to Dehner, the Tom of Finland house ‘isn’t just about the pictures [on display]. It’s much more about a headspace, a state of being, a letting go of shame and judgements, and a caring for one another. In this house, anybody can be a Tom’s man.’ §

This article originally featured in the November 2014 issue of Wallpaper* (W*188) 

INFORMATION

tomoffinland.org
#toms100

At first glance, the four-floor Craftsman-style house at 1421 Laveta Terrace looks like the kind of perfect fixer-upper that would be snapped up by the kinds of cashed-up creative types flocking to Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighbourhood. But this wholesome looking 106-year-old house, situated behind a manicured evergreen hedge, is a shrine to desire of a distinctly non-real estate kind.

Tom House, as its become known, was the erstwhile home and workplace of renegade Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen, perhaps the most influential homoerotic artist of the 20th century (as featured in W*188). Now home to the Tom of Finland Foundation and the team who faithfully administer it, the property has been immortalised for the first time in Tom House, a deluxe new volume from Rizzoli, published 8 March.

Tom died in his native Finland in 1991, but his work and legacy have continued to flourish due to the indefatigable efforts of the foundation and its founder Durk Dehner, an Auntie Mame in leather who owns and oversees this sprawling paean to the libidinal. (With more than 3,500 artworks and 100,000 documents, images and items of memorabilia, it’s the world’s largest repository of erotic art). Dehner first encountered Tom’s drawings in the late 1970s, a moment which changed the course of his life and led to the establishment of the home and foundation. 'The mission of the foundation is really to carry on Tom’s legacy, which is all about having a healthier, more natural way of looking at sexuality. We think sexuality doesn’t stop when you leave the bedroom,' says Dehner.

The book itself – the vision of creative director and Wallpaper* US editor Michael Reynolds – reflects the property’s idiosyncratic, wildly collaborative spirit. 'The moment I discovered the house some 20 years ago, I was entranced,' says Reynolds. 'I have always been captivated by provocation and things that lurk in the shadows of mainstream culture. Tom House is like a living, breathing commune – the very opposite of a dead artist’s museum. It was just a matter of waiting for the zeitgeist to be ready for this project.'

Lavish interior photographs by Martyn Thompson provide an intimate glimpse into the rambling 17-room house and its surrounds. There’s the crepuscular dungeon, with its myriad leather toys; Tom’s Room, an attic eyrie where the artist would sequester himself, chain-smoking cigarettes whilst working on collaged reference pages, sketches and preparatory drawings (many of which appear in print for the first time in Tom House); and the terraced, cheekily named Pleasure Park, which promises house guests the opportunity for alfresco assignations.

Rounding out Reynolds’ creative dream team is journalist and critic Mayer Rus, who contributed the book’s fascinating foreword. Rus places Tom of Finland and its home within a wider fine art context and captures the property’s sui generis nature.  'Tom House has always been a welcoming gathering place; it’s a safeplace, a sensibility and an almost spiritual experience given the amount of artwork that is guarded here,' says Dehner. Ultimately, it’s a destination best experienced on the page or in person: part frathouse, part bunker of Bohemia, part noncomformist bulwark. At Tom House, pleasure is always a moral imperative and life itself is a form of activism.

INFORMATION

Tom House is published by Rizzoli, $55. For more information, visit the website; Instagram: @tominlosangeles

A book signing for Tom House: Tom of Finland in Los Angeles will take place on 12 March, 4-6pm at David Kordansky Gallery

ADDRESS

David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W, Edgewood Place, Los Angeles, 90019

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The words 'affordable art' can sometimes induce a roll of the eyes, but The Posters – a Los Angeles-based company producing offset lithograph prints featuring specially commissioned artworks – is the real deal. Co-founded by model/photographer Athena Currey and Adrian Rosenfeld, who was previously a director at New York's Matthew Marks Gallery, The Posters debuted at Art Basel Miami with four images last December, and has steadily added to its offering ever since. Its collection now includes works by Nate Lowman, Wyatt Kahn, Owen Schmit, Sara VanDerBeek and Tom of Finland. Each poster is modestly priced at $55, with 10 per cent of its proceeds benefiting arts education partners, such as Inner-City Arts – an initiative located in Skid Row, downtown Los Angeles.

'It's kind of like an ecosystem,' says Currey, 'You have these great artists that are on museum walls and in galleries. We have them create offset lithographs and make them super affordable so people can then buy them and have them in their homes. That funds art education and it starts everything all over again, because these are the kids who are going to be making art and designing fashion.'

She continues, 'I'm a fan of art and I want to own this stuff, but if we can give back, that's the real goal.'

The duo's art credentials have made the success of the altruistic initiative possible. Approaching and selecting artists for the project has been a largely organic process; those involved are either friends or held in high esteem by the two founders. Although primarily an online operation – give or take a pop-up shop or two – The Posters celebrates its first brick and mortar presence at Opening Ceremony's Ace Hotel store in New York City this week. Not only will visitors be able to purchase posters that aren't available on the website any longer (such as Nate Lowman's Heart Flower), they'll also be able to savour the quality of the offset lithographs – printed on 80 pound McCoy silk cover paper – up close.

Address

Opening Ceremony at Ace Hotel
1190-1192 Broadway
New York, NY 10001

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Henzel Studio launches a new chapter of their production with a tribute to artist Tom of Finland.

The collection, which is launching at Colette this week, opens a new frontier for the Swedish rug maker. Following last year’s impressive range of high profile artist collaborations, which included rugs by Richard Prince, Linder and Mickalene Thomas, the brand is now debuting an ongoing series of partnerships with artists’ foundations to bring a wide variety of 20th century works to life under the Henzel Studio Heritage umbrella.

Combining the best craftsmanship and latest weaving techniques, the rugs will showcase a selection of the artist’s vast production of homoerotic line drawings in great detail.

The collection includes one freeform hand knotted rug and twelve tufted rugs, made of New Zealand wool and silk and intricately woven to reproduce the drawings in great details. A set of three pillows completes the range.

The collection is inspired by the unique environment that is Tom’s own home in Echo Park, Los Angeles (W* 188). Now home of the Tom of Finland Foundation, the house offers a vivid picture of the artist’s world: rooms have been left intact and include a vast array of sketches, collected images and objects that center around a theme of homoerotic sexuality and the male body.

One of the artist’s most iconic pieces, a 1978 portrait of a policeman, is the subject of the hand knotted rug (woven over a 5-month period) which includes subtle manufacturing touches such as the silk embroidery that enhances the black leather effect on the hat. The rest of the collection depicts various sexual and sensual scenes from Tom of Finland’s sketches, many of which have never been seen before. Curator Joakim Andreasson worked on the three pillows, creating unique collages from Tom of Finland’s collected imagery he found in the house.

The range offers a new perspective on Tom of Finland’s works and their modernity, affirming the artist’s great relevance in art and design today. 

ADDRESS

Colette Gallery, 213 Rue Saint-Honoré, 75001 Paris, France 

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