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.
Read MoreOn 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.
Read MoreMike Kuchar
Broken Gods
January 4 - February 2, 2020
Reception: Saturday January 11, 6-9pm
Read MoreFrançois 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.
Read MoreSYPHILIS 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.
Read MoreMike Kuchar in Ghebaly Gallery’s group exhibition Liquid Dreams.
Read MoreJust 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.
Read MoreAS 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.
Read MoreOpening 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.
Read MoreJuly 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.
Read MoreGeorge Kuchar is one of the great artists in the history of the moving image…We are amazed by the craft, the perfect cues, the skillful edits, the startling images and visual rhymes, the flawless pacing and ingenious continuity, often achieved spontaneously, in camera. His images can be both insanely bizarre and rapturously beautiful, with a hallucinatoryotherness seldom achieved by even the most visionary artists in film history…
Read MoreMIKE KUCHAR: Saints and Sinners, January 17 - February 14, 2015
François Ghebaly is pleased to host a New Year's banquet of beefcake celebrating Satyrs, Stone Age He-Men, Sugar Daddies, and Bawdy Buccaneers, drawn, painted, digitized, and hosted by underground cartoonist and movie maker, Mike Kuchar.
Read MoreMIKE KUCHAR: Brave, Bold and Bare, November 8, 2014 - January 10, 2015
“What are these acts of creation we do in paint or on film? Are they linked or related to Creation itself—the very force that gives motion, light, and form to the universe... or am I just a guy warding off boredom with a hobby that substitutes for his loneliness?”
—Mike Kuchar
Read MoreFriday, October 17 & Saturday, October 18, 2016
UP TO DATE & OUT OF THIS WORLD WITH MIKE KUCHAR!
He’s back! Yes, one-time NYC denizen Mike Kuchar makes an all-too-rare hometown appearance and return visit to Anthology. Beloved for the films he made in tandem with twin brother, George, as well as for his own over-the-top underground masterpieces, Mike is a prolific creator of moving images the likes of which you cannot imagine or even dream of. Kuchar’s work demonstrates a campy romantic eye and rapturous ear that is as indebted to lyrical poetry as it is to ecstatic imagery. Rather than rest on his voluminous back catalog, the videos that Mike has been making the last few years are undoubtedly amongst the strongest works in a career that began nearly 60 years ago.
Read MoreMike Kuchar: film follies and digital daydreams
November 29 – December 1, 2013
The vibrant, poetic and wild works of American underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar have inspired generations of filmmakers and artists with their wickedly perverse parodies of pop-culture and abundant creativity. Relishing the possibilities of the most minuscule budgets, his films and videos are radiant and lurid in equal measure, celebrating human creativity with an undiminished passion and humour for over 50 years.
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