Thanks to the efforts of the Kuchar Brothers Trust, in collaboration with Anthology and Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Mike Kuchar’s DEATH QUEST OF THE JU-JU CULTS, has been newly restored! Arguably Mike’s solo magnum opus, DEATH QUEST is a mini-epic that gleefully and lovingly combines two of Mike’s favorite – if seemingly irreconcilable – genres. What appears at first to be a straightforward prehistoric tale soon morphs into something else entirely, with the deux ex machina appearance of…sorry, no spoilers. In any case, whatever the genre, DEATH QUEST was made with a nearly non-existent budget, but with admirably game actors, Mike’s uniquely resourceful visual gifts, and his inimitable ability to combine mischievous parody with wide-eyed sincerity.
Read MoreMike Kuchar in "Secret Gay Box" @ The Tom of Finland Foundation
John Wolf Fine Art is pleased to announce its inclusion in the Spring/Break Art Show 2018 with an exhibition entitled, “Secret Gay Box” opening Friday, October 12th, 2018. The theme of the 2018 edition of the fair is ‘Stranger Comes to Town’ — an artistic examination of those who are seemingly or actually different than the world around them.
Artists include Andrew Brischler, Andrew Salgado, Andy Warhol, Brian Andrew Whiteley, David Wojnarowicz, Don Joint, Hossein Edalatkhah, Jack Pierson, Jose Gonzalo Garcia Munoz, Joseph La Piana, Justin Olerud, Lucas Michael, Robert Mapplethorpe, Mark Beard, Matt Siegle, Michael Stamm, Mike Kuchar, Patrick Angus, Puppies Puppies, Rashaad Newsome, Raymond Pettibon, and Stuart Sandford.
Read MoreMike Kuchar @ Rental Gallery
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.
Read MoreMike Kuchar @ Artists' Television Access
ATA is proud to present an evening of new and other works by Mike Kuchar (in person)!
“Relishing the possibilities of the most minuscule budgets his films are radiant and lurid in equal measure, celebrating human creativity with an undiminished passion and humor for over 50 years.”
Read MoreMIKE KUCHAR in 4COLUMNS
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.
Read MoreMIKE KUCHAR in THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mike Kuchar’s over-the-top felt-tip-and-ink drawings of gay male fantasy are weirdly innocent. The underground filmmaker (and twin brother of the other filmmaking Kuchar, George) started dreaming up his bronze-skinned, blue-eyed, naked Vikings and gladiators in the 1960s as commissioned illustrations for privately printed comic books. In the exhibition “Drawings by Mike!,” they still have the bright colors, lush details and graphic anatomical exaggerations of a vintage Mad Magazine cover.
Read MoreMike Kuchar's "Sins of the Fleshapoids" @ PFA
If you’re not familiar with the films of the Kuchar Brothers, prepare yourself for their 1966 magnum opus Sins of the Fleshapoids, screening at Pacific Film Archive at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 20th. Unless you’ve spent a lot of time attending underground film festivals, you’ve never seen anything quite like it, and PFA is dusting off its pristine archival print for the occasion.
Read MoreMIKE KUCHAR IN THE VILLAGE VOICE
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.
Read MoreMike Kuchar in Gayletter
Mike Kuchar is well known for his films. John Waters cites him as his hero, which is a pretty big compliment. But he’s always been an illustrator; the work has just been more anonymous. Kuchar has always been successful in obscurity’s sense. He worked as a magazine retoucher in the 1960s and, after moving to California, became a go-to name in the then underground comic scene. While he and his brother George Kuchar are widely known film directors, Mike has always been drawing and painting, gathering attention of a much smaller audience.
Opening just last week, Anton Kern Gallery has curated an exhibition of some of Mike’s private collection on view through September. The drawings on exhibit have never been published or shown publicly before, so on the eve of his opening, Mike answered some questions I had about the works going into the premiere.
Read MoreMike Kuchar's "The Craven Sluck" Included in MOMA's Future Imperfect Film Series
Through August 31...
Imagine a science-fiction film series with no space travel, no alien invasions or monsters, and no visions of the distant future. Imagine instead a dazzling array of science-fiction films that focus on alternate visions of Earth in the present or very near future. "The Craven Sluck" will be playing with "The Crazies" Wednesday, August 2nd @ 4pm and Sunday, August 6th @ 1pm.
Read MoreLOS ANGELES TIMES | 2017 Guggenheim fellows include Mike Kuchar
Mike Kuchar has been nominated as one of the film/video Guggenheim fellows of 2017. The winners were culled from nearly 3,000 applicants and represent 49 disciplines and artistic fields, 64 academic institutions and 27 states and the District of Columbia. The recipients range in age from 27 to 79. The size of grants vary and are given for six months to one year, depending on the scope of the project.
Read MoreMIKE KUCHAR @ ET AL. ETC.
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.
Read MoreGEORGE & Mike KUCHAR featured in the 12th Brakhage Center Symposium
George 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 MoreAN AFTERNOON WITH MIKE KUCHAR | NOWNESS.COM
January 29, 2015
“Movies should have sex appeal,” says Mike Kuchar. “It’s a basic fundamental quality and helps in making it bearable to watch.” It’s the same bravado that seared through the filmmaker’s lascivious, sugar-coated home videos made with his brother George and screened alongside friends Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekasand Andy Warhol in the New York underground film scene of the 1960s and 70s. Experimenting with 8mm film, the twin brothers from the Bronx conjured up their own camp, sexually charged pop fantasies in fleshly shades of violet, turquoise, and sunflower.
Read MoreMike Kuchar in ArtForum
January 29, 2015
Burnished bubble butts beam with unholy light. Cut and uncut, huge, veiny cocks blossom from every angle. Angels and gods, gladiators and cavemen, street hustlers and bodybuilders, S-M beltings and four-way pirate fuckfests are all drawn with the bright hues and hard lines of comic-book superheroes.
Read MoreMIKE KUCHAR @ ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVE
Friday, 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 in The Guardian
June 19, 2013
For real illustrative oomph and pizzazz, Mike Kuchar's he-man naked hunks – cavorting with dinosaurs and each other – are much more fun. He and his twin brother, George, also made ultra-camp underground movies in the 1950s and 60s, which were a major influence on director John Waters. It's a surprise any of Kuchar's gladiators and Thor-type beefcakes can even walk, let alone slay brontosauruses, given the bulging impedimenta they drag about between their legs.
Read MoreMike Kuchar in Dazed
April 2013 Issue
Gatherings happened in lofts, apartments or unused shops. But the particular loft apartment of experimental filmmaker and New York tastemaker Ken Jacobs was the place to be. “Yeah, he enjoyed our pictures and said, ‘Come back next month,’ and invited Jonas Mekas, who had a column in The Village Voice. (Mekas) also liked our pictures and wrote a big raving review. It was a great time to be making pictures; we knew Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Allen Ginsberg, they’d all come to our shows and say ‘hi’. It was a very exciting time. It was a real exchange. Everyone worked separately, everyone had their own vision, but we’d all meet up at the premieres.”
Read MoreMike Kuchar in Artforum
THE ATOMIC WAR of October 1962 had been averted. There was a heady moment-presaged by the New York World's Fair that opened in the spring of 1964 and heralded by the appearance of Roy Lichtenstein's drawing Great Rings of Saturn!! on the cover of Art in America that April: Pop Art merged with Science Fiction, and the Future was Now.
Read MoreMike Kuchar in Seattle Gay Scene
November 5, 2012
I met Mike Kuchar at Ben DeLaCreme’s house. “They’re making breakfast, but no bacon – I love bacon,” Mike Kuchar told me nervously before we began our interview. I put him in front of the foresty photo wallpaper because it made me think of his films. Later that day, Three Dollar Bill Cinema was screening Kuchar Brothers’ movies at the Northwest Film Forum. Kuchar sat in the front row and provided a live commentary, sharing with us behind the scenes anecdotes and inspirations responsible for titles such as “Hold Me While I’m Naked” and “I Was a Teenage Rumpot”. His narration was, just as his and his brother’s films, brilliant, heart-breaking, unassuming and, perhaps, unintentionally hilarious.
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