MIKE KUCHAR
Selected Exhibitions
Featured
Art
François Ghebaly is honored to present Big, Bad Boys, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with legendary artist and filmmaker Mike Kuchar. Big, Bad Boys marks the gallery’s second exhibition at our new West Hollywood space located at 1109 N Poinsettia Place, West Hollywood.
Mike Kuchar has been a majorly influential figure in the underground film and comics scenes since the 1960s, first in his hometown of the Bronx and, from the 1970s on, in the creative hotbed of San Francisco. Together with his twin brother George, the Kuchars gained cult recognition for their over-the-top, no-budget films that sent up Hollywood epics, weepy romances, and sci-fi B movies. In iconic films like Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), The Craven Sluck (1967), and Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults(1976), Mike developed his distinctive style that jettisoned traditional narrative structure and acting professionalism in favor of extravagant, tender sagas that would have a significant impact on emerging theorizations and expressions of camp as an artistic sensibility.
On the occasion of Tom of Finland’s birthday (8th May), Tom of Finland Foundation and The Community have curated a group exhibition, supported by Diesel, presenting Tom of Finland Foundation’s permanent collection.
All Together explores the erotic art collection consisting of thousands of artworks, spanning multiple decades and encompassing all media and techniques. This exhibition is possible because of the Foundation’s efforts in preserving the work of Queer artists, many of whom have faced discrimination and misrepresentation due to the nature of what they create.
For thirty-seven years, Tom of Finland Foundation has been building the world’s most extensive collection of LGBTQ+ art. The diverse curation of this show highlights the stories of over seventy featured artists and comprises more than two hundred works of art from the 1940s to the present day.
The opening in Venice coincides with the first weekend of the Venice Biennale and the opening in Paris celebrates Tom’s birth date.
Mike Kuchar
Broken Gods
January 4 - February 2, 2020
Reception: Saturday January 11, 6-9pm
François Ghebaly Gallery presents a group show entitled Bad Peach, which will include the work of Mike Kuchar opening August 10, 2019 and on view until September 7, 2019.
SYPHILIS is curated by Adam Cohen and Anton Kern. Syphilis is an exhibition that reflects on hope and fear, pleasure and mortality. The idea originated from a conversation about this disease and how it can serve as a metaphor. Artists in the show explore themes of love and lechery in equal measure. The exhibition is on view at Rental Gallery from July 27th - August 22nd, 2018.
Mike Kuchar in Ghebaly Gallery’s group exhibition Liquid Dreams.
Just around the corner from jewelers Harry Winston, that midtown Manhattan temple devoted to the rituals of heterosexuality, Anton Kern Gallery is hosting an artist whose work could make many a bride blush. Journey up a white marble staircase to the third floor, past the gallery’s bathroom and some primly rendered wall text that warns “this exhibition contains graphic imagery,” and you’ll enter a world predicated on rather different fantasies of coupling.
Here, in a show simply titled Drawings by Mike!, are twenty-two neatly framed ink-and-felt-tip-pen cartoons of tousle-haired Caucasian bohunks engaged in a variety of joyously, nakedly homoerotic situations: skinny dipping, crotch grabbing, pec rubbing, tit sucking. Their bare asses are, without exception, spheric and shiny, like the juiciest apple you’d ever hope to bite.
AS AN ILLUSTRATOR, MY AIM IS TO AMUSE THE EYE AND SPARK IMAGINATION, wrote the great American artist and filmmaker Mike Kuchar in Primal Male, a book of his collected drawings. TO CREATE TITILLATING SCENES THAT REFRESH THE SOUL…AND PUT A BIT MORE “FUN” TO VIEWING PICTURES — and that he has done for over five decades. “Drawings by Mike!” is an exhibition of erotic illustrations at Anton Kern Gallery, one of the fall season’s great feasts for the eye and a welcome homecoming for one of New York’s most treasured prodigal sons.
Opening reception for Drawings by Mike! at Anton Kern Gallery on Thursday, September 7th from 6–8pm. Exhibition runs until October 7th, 2017. In conjunction with the exhibition, a screening of select films, including Kuchar’s seminal Sins of the Fleshapoids, will be shown at the Core Club Cinema on Friday, September 8, 2017 from 7 p.m. RSVP is required for this event. For more information please contact Nadia Fristensky at rsvp@antonkerngallery.com.
July 23, 2016
Mike Kuchar was born in the Bronx in New York in 1942, a few minutes before his twin, George. At age 12, the twins started to make films using an 8mm camera their mother gave them. They became central to the 1960s New York underground film scene, screening work alongside Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and Jack Smith.