The Shape of Desire, Eroticism in Art - PART II of II
- Diamond Zhou
- 6 days ago
- 16 min read
welcome to our
SATURDAY EVENING POST
May 17th, 2025
The Shape of Desire - Eroticism in Art, Part I of II
Eroticism in art has long been an exploration of human desire, often portrayed through the lens of sexual imagery. However, in contemporary art, this exploration has shifted from the explicit to the more nuanced, where desire, identity, and materiality intertwine. Last week, we looked at how eroticism historically manifested itself in art, shaped by cultural norms and power dynamics. But as we move into this weekend, we dive into how contemporary artists have reclaimed and transformed the erotic, pushing boundaries beyond simple sexuality to engage with profound emotional and psychological territories.
However, at the heart of this transformation lies an intriguing idea: the notion that sexual energy is fundamentally the same as creative energy. The theory suggests that the very energy that drives sexual desire is also the driving force behind artistic creation. Sigmund Freud’s conception of libido as a life force, or Wilhelm Reich’s exploration of "orgastic potency," point to the idea that when we allow ourselves to embrace and channel this energy, it can manifest in both the sexual and the creative realms. This concept provides a fertile ground for understanding how contemporary artists infuse their work with sensuality, vulnerability, and an exploration of self, all of which transcend traditional representations of the erotic.
CONTENT WARNING: Explicit nudity and sexual imagery.
Viewer discretion advised.
Erotic Materiality and the Aesthetics of Sensation
When is touch itself a form of desire? Contemporary art often answers: when the artwork invites us to feel, not only emotionally, but almost physically. Many artists today engage the senses directly, treating texture, weight, light, and time as languages of eroticism. The result is an art of sensation, art that affects the viewer viscerally, that slows our gaze to a caress, and that uses material presence to provoke intimate attention. In a world inundated with explicit imagery, these artists find the erotic in the way we attend to form and matter. There is a phenomenological bent to this approach: a sense that truly seeing or touching can be an erotic act in itself, a “charged attentiveness,” to borrow a phrase from last week. By stripping away narrative and sometimes even recognizable imagery, the artwork’s materiality becomes the site of desire: polished stone or warm skin, dripping paint or glowing light, all can become metaphors for the body and its yearnings.
One powerful example is Janine Antoni, who has built an entire career out of using her own body as an artistic tool, and, in doing so, blurring the line between creator and object of desire. In her installation Lick and Lather (1993), Antoni cast fourteen busts of herself, half in chocolate and half in soap, and then sensually eroded them: she licked the chocolate faces until their features blurred, and bathed with the soap faces until they dissolved. The remnants are ghostly self-portraits with smoothed cheeks and faint impressions of eyes and lips. The act of licking and washing transforms classical portrait sculpture into an intimate ritual. It is as if the artist’s own desire, the literal tongue on flesh of chocolate, has become the sculptor’s chisel. The work carries a gentle shock: traditionally, a portrait in bronze or marble is meant to immortalize features in permanence, yet Antoni’s chocolate and soap busts instead speak to ephemerality and touch. They invite us to imagine the tactile experience: the taste of chocolate, the slippery lather of soap, and the artist’s “unmaking” of form through bodily acts. As Antoni herself reflected, “there’s this element of destruction, that we have to kind of unmake in order to make.” In this unmaking, Lick and Lather finds an eroticism of process, creation as an act of loving consumption. The viewer, confronted with the slowly disintegrated faces, feels both the tenderness and the transgression of the gesture. It is erotic not because it depicts a body in a sexual pose (it doesn’t), but because it embodies an act of intimacy and self-intimacy. Attention becomes erotic: to stand before these haunting busts is to be aware of the artist’s lingering presence, the memory of tongue and skin and breath that shaped them.
If Antoni brings touch to sculpture, Robert Mapplethorpe brings touch to vision. Mapplethorpe’s photographs are famously sensual in their precision. His gelatin silver prints of nude figures, often friends and lovers posed in classical balance, exemplify the aesthetics of sensation through light and composition. In Ajitto (1981), for example, a nude Black man is curled atop a pedestal, knees drawn to chest, head bowed between his crossed arms. The figure’s musculature catches the light in lustrous highlights and deep shadows, every contour of skin rendered in exquisite detail. Mapplethorpe’s camera turns flesh into marble and back again: the image exudes both strength and vulnerability. The eroticism here is refined: a play of gleaming skin, the grain of film as palpable as the grain of flesh, and a composed stillness that paradoxically heightens the sensuality. In Mapplethorpe’s work, as in much of contemporary photography that deals with the body, there is an emphasis on form and attention. We are made aware of how we look, the photograph slows down our act of looking to a nearly tactile crawl. The eye traces the photograph like a hand might trace a body’s outline. Mapplethorpe once said he sought to capture the perfect moment of balance and clarity; in doing so, he created images that feel almost like sculpture, giving the viewer the vicarious sensation of touch through sight. Erotic desire, in these works, resides in perception itself, in the quiet charged space between viewer and photograph, where light on skin evokes the memory or longing of physical contact.
Not all sensual minimalism in art centres on the human body directly; sometimes materials and space play erotic roles by analogy or by the moods they provoke. Anish Kapoor, for instance, engages the viewer’s senses and subconscious through abstract forms that often carry unmistakable sexual or bodily references. Kapoor’s sculptures and installations frequently involve polished curves, voids, or oozing materials that trigger a bodily response. Dirty Corner(2011–15), a massive rusted steel funnel, was controversially described as "the vagina of the queen," engaging primal bodily symbolism. In a subtler approach, When I Am Pregnant (1992) uses an almost imperceptible bulge in a smooth white wall to evoke the shape of a pregnant belly. The sculpture’s presence is ghostly: the white of the wall and the white of the object are nearly the same, so the form appears and disappears depending on the angle of view. Encountering it is like catching a glimpse of a phantom. There is an erotic suggestion in the title and form (the ripe curve of pregnancy, metaphorically the result of intimacy and the promise of new life), yet the piece remains abstract and meditative.
Lee Ufan goes further in making minimal materials enact an almost theatrical sensual encounter. A founder of the Mono-ha movement and a master of meditative minimalism, Lee Ufan arranges stone, steel, glass, and canvas in ways that heighten our awareness of space and ourselves. Surprisingly, critics have often noted a subtle eroticism in his installations. In one sculpture, Relatum—Silence (2008), a large smooth boulder lies on the gallery floor, leaning toward an upright steel plate that rests against the wall. As one reviewer described it: “Sensual the boulder upon the floor, sensual the metal plate against the wall. Sensual the water-glossed curves of stones, the muscular thickness of steel. The two components…flirt with each other and the viewer, who is drawn haplessly into a coquettish ménage-à-trois.” This remarkably evocative description casts the stone and steel as lovers in a silent dance: the boulder “sloping seductively” and the plate “coyly” propped, each endowed with a tacit anthropomorphism of desire. The viewer, positioned in the space, cannot help but feel like a participant, or a metaphorical “third-wheel” in this triangulated scene of attraction. Lee Ufan favours the term “encounter” for how his art works: the meeting of viewer and materials as a fragile, phenomenological nexus where subject and object briefly commune. The erotic here is in the attention and presence: a recognition of being embodied in the moment, confronted with other bodies that suggest silent potential. By stripping art of narrative or figuration, Lee Ufan allows the raw qualities of matter to come forward: cool smoothness, weight, tension, balance.
Erotic Myth and the Sacred Body
As we briefly discussed in our last week’s post, since antiquity, erotic desire has been framed in the language of myth and the sacred, from temple rites to allegorical lovers. Contemporary artists continue to engage with these themes, but with a subversive, often empowering approach. Bodies in these works are not simply bodies, they are symbols, elevated to sacred status and transformed through myth and ritual. These artists reclaim eroticism as a force that can be awe-filled, transformative, and transcendent.
Consider Kiki Smith, an artist who has repeatedly drawn from biblical, mythological, and fairy-tale imagery to explore the female body and its powers. One of her most iconic works, Lilith (1994), presents a bronze life-size figure of a woman crouching upside-down on a wall, her glass eyes fixed in a piercing gaze. Lilith, in Jewish mythology, was Adam’s first wife, a woman created equal to man who, according to legend, refused to submit and fled Eden. Smith’s sculpture captures the wild, defiant spirit of this mythic figure. Lilith clings to the wall at a midpoint between floor and ceiling, as if she could scurry away at any moment. Her position is unusual and unsettling: because she is inverted and elevated, the viewer often finds themselves looking up at her slightly, meeting those uncanny eyes. Here, the female body is not a passive vessel of beauty, it is rather, an active, crouching, ready entity, charged with its own power. The erotic in Smith’s Lilith is complicated: it is imbued with danger and autonomy. By literally turning the portrayal of a woman upside down (and on the wall rather than a pedestal), Smith subverts millennia of artistic convention and invites a more primal response. Lilith’s glass eyes have a lifelike glint; they catch the light and seem to follow the viewer. One might feel, eerily, that the sculpture is watching us, judging us perhaps, rather than we gazing upon her. This reversal of the gaze injects an erotic tension of its own—a sense of being seen in return, caught in the act.
Another artist mining cultural myths to express contemporary eros is Shahzia Sikander, who reinterprets Indo-Persian miniature painting traditions through a feminist and transnational lens. Sikander’s work, including Perilous Order (1997) and Pleasure Pillars (2001), merges fragmented figures from various cultural traditions, often centering the female form. Sikander’s art challenges the traditional portrayal of women as passive figures in mythology, instead presenting them as active protagonists. This reclamation of erotic power reconfigures the gaze, allowing women to take ownership of their own desire, disrupting the binaries imposed by traditional representations.
Reclaiming Erotic Identity Through Representation
Throughout art history, the nude and the erotic had been overwhelmingly framed by a male, Eurocentric gaze, women were muses, never authors, and colonised or non-white bodies were exorcized rather than self-defined. In the late 20th century, this began to change. Marginalized creators seized the tools of representation to assert their own erotic identities, imbuing the imagery of desire with new agency, pride, and complexity. In their hands, erotic art became a site of empowerment and critique: a way to subvert myths, upend power dynamics, and heal the alienation that comes when one’s image is controlled by others.
One of the earliest and most celebrated figures in this movement was Carolee Schneemann (American, 1939–2019), a pioneer of feminist body art. Schneemann’s works in the 1960s boldly centered the female body as both subject and author of erotic art, in direct opposition to millennia of women depicted as passive objects. She famously wrote, “since the female body had always been usurped by traditions of art history…I wanted to see what would happen with this energy of sensuality… that I felt.” In pieces like the film Fuses (1964–66), Schneemann and her partner made love on camera in sequences that she then hand-painted and collaged, crafting an abstracted, female-centric view of sexual pleasure. The result is layered with flashes of bodies, seaside light, and painterly scratches, an erotic experience filtered through a woman’s own sensory lens rather than a pornographic script.
In 1975, Schneemann staged the performance Interior Scroll, standing naked and slowly extracting a paper scroll from her vagina, from which she read a manifesto. Both works were radically transgressive, reclaiming the female body’s interior and its sexuality as sources of knowledge and creativity. She positioned herself, in her words, as “image and image-maker” in one. The shock these works evoked was precisely the point: they confronted audiences with a woman in charge of her own erotic narrative, unapologetically embodied and intellectually present. This was eroticism as self-representation, a reclamation of agency where the woman is not muse but artist, not object but active subject of desire.
Schneemann opened a floodgate for feminist artists to follow. In her wake, Hannah Wilke photographed herself posed like a pin-up, sometimes with small vulva-shaped chewing-gum sculptures stuck to her skin—a witty send-up of glamour conventions that reasserted control over the terms of display. Judy Chicago in the 1970s created monumental vulvic imagery to celebrate female sexual anatomy as sacred and powerful, not shameful. By the 1980s, as theory caught up with practice, the feminist critique of the “male gaze” became widely acknowledged. Artists responded by actively destabilizing the gaze in their work. For instance, Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoisie Noire performances and Marina Abramović’s confronting stare pieces both forced viewers to become self-aware of how they were looking at a woman’s body. In photography and video, women began crafting an alternative gaze, one that might be female, queer, or otherwise non-normative, turning the erotic into a dialogue about power and perception.
Perhaps nowhere is the reclamation of erotic identity more striking than in the work of artists of colour and from postcolonial backgrounds, who have tackled the compounded histories of racialised, sexualized imagery. They ask: who gets to tell the story of bodies that were long fetishized or suppressed under colonial eyes? One answer comes from Mickalene Thomas (American, b. 1971), who paints bold, rhinestone-encrusted portraits of black women in luxuriant, odalisque-like settings. In her large triptych A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007), a nude black woman reclines amid a riot of patterned fabrics, gazing outward with a cool, self-assured expression. The composition deliberately recalls the classic “reclining nude” of art history: Ingres’s Grand Odalisque or Manet’s Olympia, yet everything is transformed. Thomas casts a black woman as the leading lady in this scene, in place of the coy white courtesans of old, and enrobes her in a visual vocabulary of 1970s Blaxploitation glam and modern collage. The viewer is invited to admire her, yes, but also to recognize that she admires herself. The power of self-representation here is both visual and social: it corrects a long imbalance by which women of colour were rarely shown as autonomous desirous beings in art. Now, they command the frame, radiant in their subjectivity.
Kent Monkman’s The Triumph of Mischief (2007) reclaims eroticism within a postcolonial context. By inserting queer Indigenous desire into historical narratives, Monkman subverts colonial representations of Indigenous bodies, turning eroticism into an act of cultural and political resistance. The painting brims with erotic charge: male nudes grapple and twirl, mythical creatures and humans copulate in defiance of any civilized order. Here, eros becomes an instrument of postcolonial satire and reclamation. By inserting queer Indigenous desire into the very heart of a canvas that parodies 19th-century “frontier” paintings, Monkman is reclaiming the narrative of a people who were often depicted as savages or passive subjects. Sexuality in his work pointedly deconstructs colonial power—it is the tool of the Trickster undoing the strait-laced, moralizing gaze of colonizers. In The Triumph of Mischief, Monkman essentially flips the script of history: Indigenous characters (and the queer, gender-fluid among them) take center stage, vividly alive and in charge of their pleasure, while historical European figures look absurd or are literally bewitched by desire.
By weaving these threads, they assert that their desire is not aberrant but part of a larger human story. The erotic self becomes heroic, archetypal, worthy of reverence rather than scorn. As viewers, to engage with this art is to be invited into a more reflective, ethical gaze. We are asked to see beyond surface titillation, to appreciate the courage and creativity it takes to put forth one’s intimate self in a world that has often denied it. These works can be confrontational, even uncomfortable, but also deeply moving. They carry the thrill of transgression that all erotic art harbours, yet also a sense of justice and healing. A painting of a reclining nude becomes not an invitation for conquest, but a challenge: will you recognize this person’s autonomy and context? Will you see them as whole?
The Playful and Sensual Side of Eroticism in Art
Eroticism in art isn’t solely political or about power, it is about connection, self-knowledge, and the fearless expression of life force, it also embodies the sensuality of human desire. Erotic art, in its purest form, is a celebration of beauty and the body, a playful exploration of the pleasures and joys of touch, the gaze, and intimacy. It invites us to admire the body not just as a site of sexuality, but as an object of beauty, with all the excitement and allure that desire brings, without the difficult conversations about body and body politics. It is sometimes quiet, soaked in solitude, and tinged with a sense of forbidden joy, and might I say, naughtiness.
The sensuality of erotic art is tied to the joy of seeing and being seen. The act of gazing at a beautiful form: whether it is a sculptural curve, a painted figure, or a photographic pose, is inherently erotic. This gaze, which often feels coy or playful, connects the viewer to the artist's creation in a deeply personal way. The allure of the erotic often lies in its mystery: the excitement of engaging with something that feels both familiar and forbidden. Erotic art celebrates the beauty in desire, the tension between the viewer and the viewed, and the subtle pleasure of being caught in that gaze.
Eroticism in art allows us to experience the pure joy of seeing beauty and engaging with it. It connects us to the human form in its most sensual state, inviting us to appreciate the complexities of the body, the thrill of intimacy, and the fleeting beauty of desire. Here, eroticism is not a political statement but an invitation to revel in the pure, unadulterated pleasure of touch and gaze, to be playful and excited by the very nature of the body and its capacities for pleasure.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Barbara Astman: Concealed/Revealed
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Tony Robins: Flowers of Resistance
Opening Saturday, June 21st, 2025
