Artists
Selected from the archives of RoB Gallery and Tom of Finland Foundation, these artists form the foundation of ICONS OF DESIRE; an exhibition exploring the images, bodies, fantasies, and aspirations that shape our understanding of desire.
Tom of Finland
Tom of Finland was the pseudonym of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen. Born in 1920, he became one of the most influential figures in queer visual culture through his iconic drawings of confident, hypermasculine men. His work helped redefine gay representation in the postwar era and became synonymous with the aesthetics of leather, fetish, and sexual liberation.
By the early '70s, Tom of Finland's drawings had found an international audience within communities through physique magazines, comic publications, and mail-order networks.
Tom of Finland maintained a long association with RoB Gallery, having 8 solo exhibitions and a few group shows.
RoB Gallery opened in 1978 with an exhibition of drawings by Tom of Finland, marking a turning point for both Amsterdam and the artist.
Erwin Olaf
Erwin Olaf was one of the Netherlands' most celebrated photographers. Born in Hilversum in 1959, he first gained recognition in the 1980s with bold and provocative images that explored sexuality, identity, and the LGBTQ+ experience. His distinctive visual language would later earn him international acclaim as both an artist and commercial photographer.
Rob Meijer and Erwin Olaf met in the early 1980s, Their friendship led to their first collaboration. For Olaf's photographic series Chessmen (1988), he borrowed leather accessories from RoB Amsterdam, marking the start of a creative relationship between the photographer and the iconic leather shop.
In 1992, RoB published a landmark catalogue featuring Olaf's photography, helping to shape the visual culture of the international leather community.
For ICONS OF DESIRE, we show a selection of these iconic catalog photographs Erwin Olaf made for RoB.
Nigel Kent
Nigel Kent (1933–2017) was born in Australia, and studied painting before settling in Amsterdam. In the early '70s Rob and Nigel started dating, making Kent closely involved in the early development of RoB Amsterdam, Kent was instrumental in Rob's leather ‘awakening’ and remained a close friend after their relationship ended.
Encouraged by the creative atmosphere surrounding the launch of RoB Gallery, he began producing his own homoerotic drawings under the pseudonym James D.
he was quickly invited to stage his first exhibition at RoB Gallery.
What followed was a steadily expanding exhibition history: first throughout the Netherlands, then across Europe, and ultimately in the United States.
Alongside his artwork, Nigel also illustrated flyers and advertisements for RoB Amsterdam, helping to shape RoB's early visual identity.
for ICONS OF DESIRE we reunite audiences with works that have remained unseen since the 1980s, from Rob's personal collection.
Bastille
Bastille was the pseudonym of the late artist Frank Webber. Born in New Jersey, in 1929, he studied illustration at Pratt Institute in New York before moving to Paris.
Webber began producing homoerotic drawings in the late 1960s. His highly explicit and uncompromising depictions of male sexuality gained wider recognition in the 1980s through exhibitions at RoB Gallery in Amsterdam and New York.
Nigel Kent and Bastille became friends and exchanged highly embellished letters with one another. The envelopes from this correspondence are preserved by the Tom of Finland Foundation.
For ICONS OF DESIRE, we present a selection of gouache paintings alongside more spontaneous sketches from the archives of RoB Gallery.
Bill Ward
Bill Ward was a British artist born in London in 1927. After a career in commercial illustration and children's comics, he began producing homoerotic drawings that would establish him as one of the most distinctive figures in queer graphic art.
From the 1970s onward, Ward's work appeared in influential British and American gay publications, including Drummer magazine, where his iconic character Drum became widely recognised. His bold depictions of hypermasculine men and leather culture earned him an international cult following.
For ICONS OF DESIRE, we present a selection of original works by Bill Ward from the archives of RoB Gallery, representing the diversity of his artistic styles and techniques.
in Dialogue with Contemporary Voices
The exhibition brings together 23 contemporary artists whose work explores themes of identity, desire, fetish, masculinity, and queer community, continuing the legacies that RoB and Tom of Finland helped establish.
Co-curated by Richard Villani Tom of Finland Foundation & Izaäk Joziasse RoB, the exhibition presents paintings, sculptures, and videos, showcasing both emerging and established contemporary voices in queer erotic art. Drawing on their personal experiences, sexuality, and diverse gender identities, the artists create deeply individual visions of desire, intimacy, and self-expression, expanding and reimagining the possibilities of queer representation.
Austin of Texas
Daniel Austin Lopez, is a contemporary sculptor whose practice blends digital technology with traditional handcraft. Working under the artist name Austin of Texas, he digitally sculpts original figures before producing them in resin through 3D printing.
Each sculpture is meticulously hand-painted in acrylic, resulting in unique, one-of-one works that combine precision, texture, and a distinctly personal touch.
Featured in ICONS OF DESIRE is Austin of Texas' portrait sculpture of Richard Villani, one of the exhibition's curators and a longtime advocate for queer art and artistic archives through the Tom of Finland Foundation.
Lopez's artwork is included in the permanent collection of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the TOM House in Los Angeles and the private collection of the internationally acclaimed DJ Honey Dijon.
Carlos Enfedaque
Carlos Enfedaque, is a Berlin-based painter from Spain. After finishing his Masters program in 2018 he moved to Berlin where he’s based ever since. His work has been exhibited at such venues as SETAREH Berlin, Galería Nueva in Madrid or “Las Naves” Centro de Creación Contemporánea in Valencia.
Carlos' main medium is oil on linen. His paintings, consist mostly of human figures and portraits, his interest lies in the ambiguity of identity, playfully questioning the perception of the viewer. He believes in painting as an impulsive and intuitive act in order to create a fresh and direct expression.
Enfedaque was the Artist in Residence at TOM House in 2025 and 2026.
Carlos Marló
Carlos Marló, is a contemporary collage artist whose work explores desire, identity, mythology, and queer experience through carefully composed assemblages of found imagery. By layering vintage photographs, classical references, and symbolic elements, he creates visually rich narratives that examine the intersections of eroticism, beauty, and human emotion.
During this exhibition, Marló presents a series of collages entitled “HIMEROS”.
Himeros, in Ancient Greek ἐμερος (himeros), meaning “desire,” is the personification of sensuality, lust, and sexual desire. Himeros became the faithful companion of his brother Eros, arousing the sexual appetite of the chosen ones regardless of sex; this is why he is considered the PATRON of HOMOSEXUAL LOVE.
Carta Monir
Carta Monir is an artist, author, cartoonist, and porn performer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Working across writing, film, publishing, and adult media, her practice explores intimacy, identity, disability, technology, and the emotional contradictions of contemporary life with humor, vulnerability, and radical honesty.
Monir is the creator of the acclaimed autobiographical zine, Napkin (Thank you for having sex with Carta Monir) (2019).
Whether making comics, performing on camera, or writing about sex, gender, and the internet, Monir's work resists easy categorization. Her voice is at once deeply personal and sharply observant, examining the ways people build connection, perform identity, and search for meaning in increasingly mediated worlds.
Her work has appeared in publications including LUX, and she continues to create independently across print, digital, and adult media.
Donald C. Shorter Jr.
Donald is a multidisciplinary artist whose works explores identity and seeks to answer the question “Can my body be free?” Based in NYC Donald has danced with world renowned professional modern dance companies and has been in Broadway national touring productions.
Most recently, Donald's creative practice is exploring leather culture, sex, and identity. His mission is to showcase the depth of intimacy that can be found in BDSM. Showcasing the humanity of his subjects is his main priority. Donald wants to help others understand why we identify as leather folx and how this form of radical self acceptance can lead to spiritual transformation.
Donald’s work has been presented at The Pompidou Center, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Judson Memorial Church, 92nd St Y, Center for Performance Research, The Criterion Channel, The Hump Film Festival, and The Tom of Finland Foundation.
Enrique Agudo
Enrique Agudo is a multidisciplinary artist, architect, and filmmaker whose practice explores the intersection of digital technologies and material craft. Working across virtual reality, generative animation, digital sculpture, wearable technology, and Jacquard weaving, he investigates how emerging technologies can be approached through the lens of the humanities, drawing deeply from art history, poetry, fashion, and mythology.
Born in Madrid and shaped by a transatlantic career between Madrid and Los Angeles, Agudo studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and IE University in Madrid before completing both a Master of Architecture (M.Arch 2) and an MFA in Fiction and Entertainment at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).
Fausto
Fausto (born 1972, East Germany) is a Berlin-based painter whose deeply personal work explores identity, masculinity, and gay sensuality. Working primarily in oil on canvas and drawing on Old Master techniques, he paints male figures inspired by his friends and the city's queer community.
His work gained early recognition in Berlin's queer art scene. In 2023, he connected with the Tom of Finland Foundation and was invited to an artist residency at Tom House in Los Angeles, where he developed his first solo exhibition, A House of Angels, presented in 2024.
Before returning to painting in 2009, Fausto trained as a physician and specialized in plastic and reconstructive surgery, working in Berlin, Zurich, and Bavaria. He now combines his artistic practice with full-time work on professional healthcare committees.
Francesco Brunetti
Francesco Brunetti is an Italian artist based in London whose figurative drawings explore the beauty, vulnerability, and sensuality of the male form. Working primarily in pencil and watercolor on paper, he creates finely rendered compositions that balance technical precision with emotional intimacy. His practice celebrates the male nude while challenging long-standing cultural perceptions surrounding masculinity and the representation of the male body in contemporary art.
His work, "Biking", is a pencil-on-paper piece (you can watch the process in a time-lapse on his instagram profile). It encapsulates themes such as freedom, undisclosed desires, alienation, and irony, just like the majority of his work. There are some Easter eggs that he hopes people will notice, especially when seeing it in person, make sure to look closely; there's a whole story unfolding there.
Giovanni de Francesco
Giovanni de Francesco is an Italian multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. His work explores transformation, memory, and the relationship between the human body and the natural world through a poetic visual language.
Blending figurative and organic forms, de Francesco creates works that invite reflection on identity, vulnerability, and the beauty of change.
Giovanni presents eight works from his Male Nudes in Stripe Shirts series. Each portrait is titled with the date on which the artist met its subject, transforming a personal encounter into a lasting record through paint.
Johnny Abbate
Johnny Abbate is an Italian photographer based between Berlin and Naples whose work explores intimacy, desire, and emotional vulnerability through portraiture, Polaroids, and mixed-media photography. His images blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, capturing moments that are at once erotic, melancholic, and deeply personal.
Drawing from queer experience and the emotional complexities of human connection, Abbate's practice transforms themes of longing, fetish, and memory into poetic visual narratives. His work celebrates the tenderness and ambiguity of desire while inviting viewers to reconsider masculinity through a lens of vulnerability and intimacy.
Konstantinos Menelaou
Konstantinos Menelaou is an artist and filmmaker whose practice explores the intersections of memory, queer identity, performance, and cultural history. Working across film, moving image, and curatorial projects, he combines documentary, fiction, and experimental approaches to examine the ways personal narratives intersect with collective archives and popular culture.
Menelaou developed a body of work that has been presented internationally at film festivals, museums, and galleries including BFI Flare London, Queer Lisboa, Thessaloniki Film Festival, Barbican Gallery, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Centre Pompidou, and Reeling Chicago.
Alongside his film practice, Menelaou founded The Queer Archive, an ongoing platform dedicated to preserving, exhibiting, and expanding queer artistic narratives through exhibitions, screenings, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Across his work, he is interested in the archive not as a repository of the past, but as a living space where identity, history, and desire can be continually reimagined.
Łukasz Leja
Łukasz Leja (he/him) is a Polish figurative painter based in New York City. Working primarily in oil on canvas, his practice draws on his background in architecture and centers on themes of queer love, intimacy, and kink. Leja often incorporates himself into the work through staged photographs taken with completed paintings.
Łukasz presents two new paintings that (in the view of the exhibition's curators) invite comparison with works by Bastille from the RoB Gallery archive. While unmistakably contemporary, the paintings echo aspects of Bastille's visual language, establishing a subtle conversation between contemporary practice and historical material.
He is the recipient of the 2022 Tom of Finland Emerging Artist Award. Since then, he has presented three solo exhibitions: home is where the h<3rd is in New York City (2024), Luke of Poland in Los Angeles (2025), and Satyriasis in Paris, France (2026).
M Black
According to the artist's self-description, M Black (born 1999, they/them) is a prairie-born, white-settler artist and writer based in Mi'kma'ki (Atlantic Canada). They hold a BFA in expanded media from NSCAD University.
Their practice combines digital, analog, and camera-less image-making processes alongside installation, performance, and text to interrogate, complicate, and pervert systems of power. In their abstracted forms and sculptural ephemera is a through line of inquiry into how the domains of gender and sexuality have been, and continues to be, negotiated, regulated, and (re)produced across time and place.
Mees van Zanten
Mees van Zanten (he/they) is a Dutch multidisciplinary, self-taught artist whose practice spans visual art, performance, film, and text.
Through explicit imagery, personal narratives, and immersive installations, Mees explores themes of gender, sexuality, physicality, and social taboos. Their work embraces vulnerability and discomfort as catalysts for dialogue, challenging conventions surrounding identity, shame, and queer experience.
For this exhibition, Mees presents a series of graphite drawings that centre masculine anatomy as a site of longing, projection, and becoming. Created from a trans masculine perspective, the works reflect on the distance between the body we inherit, the body we imagine, and the body we come to know through desire.
Alongside these drawings, a conceptual silicone sculpture reflecting on memory, intimacy, and queer cultural heritage will be presented: a piece he has developed in collaboration with ICONS OF DESIRE curator Izaäk Joziasse.
Michael Espinoza
Michael Espinoza (they/them) is a non-binary, multi-racial, multi-disciplinary artist whose work embodies & embraces the undone artistic practices of Queer Ancestors lost to persecution, disease, fatal sadness, & closets.
They are a member of the gallery co-op Carnation Contemporary in Portland, Oregon. Currently, their practice borrows strategies from embroidery, quilting, digital media, sculpture & photography to explore sex & sexuality, intersectional identities, intimacy, the body, & contact with the dead.
They have previously exhibited live performance, site-specific installation, & video; their work can be found in public art collections, digital spaces, domestic & international group shows, & the many spaces intended for queer joy.
Michael is building two new bodies of artifacts and photography-based fiber work ("snapshots for future lovers" & "Instant Gratification"), both about loss, survival, sexual liberation and conspiring with ancestors towards queer futurity.
Oat Montien
Oat Montien (Born 1989) is among Thailand’s most prominent Queer artists. Growing up in a brothel in Bangkok, Oat has always been inspired by sexuality and nightlife. His background in museology has geared his artistic practice towards Queering of historical canon. His drawings and paintings interrogate the intimacy between the artist and his models, with strong emphasis on their gender identities.
Montien has previously exhibited at institutions such as Patpong Museum (Bangkok), National Library of Thailand (Bangkok), Chulalongkorn University Museum of Natural History (Bangkok), Thailand Cultural Center (Bangkok), Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (Bangkok), The V&A Museum of Childhood (London), The Book Club (London), Chester Beatty Library (Dublin), Today Art Museum (Beijing).
In 2020 he founded Boddhisattava Gallery, Thailand’s first exclusively LGBTQ+ gallery.
Montien was selected as Artist-in-Residence at Tom of Finland Foundation in 2022, and again in 2023.
Orpheus
Orpheus is a largely self taught oil painter based on the south coast of England. He spent many years perfecting his technique and secretly painting his highly charged scenes of gay sex alongside a ‘respectable’ itinerant career as an international civil servant.
His work has significantly increased in scale and ambition since leaving his job to focus on his art.
His wanderings round the Louvre as a teenager, whilst briefly living in Paris, gave him a love of old master art which still infuses his work.
His paintings previously appeared in exhibitions in the UK and Canada, but FILTH is the first large body of his work to be shown publicly. Orpheus was an artist in residence at the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, in 2025.
Pietro Spirito
Pietro Spirito (born is 1981) is an Italian contemporary artist living and working between Milan, Berlin, and Paris.
Born in Manduria, Southern Italy, he studied Painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. Working across painting and sculpture, Spirito has developed a distinctive visual language that merges irony, desire, and contemporary iconography.
Best known for his hybrid sculptures combining human bodies with animal heads, he creates enigmatic figures that exist between mythology, pop culture, and the classical sculptural tradition. His practice explores themes of voyeurism, identity, intimacy, and the ways digital culture shapes the representation and consumption of the body.
Working primarily with glazed terracotta, Spirito pairs one of the oldest sculptural materials with a highly polished, almost synthetic aesthetic. The tension between handcrafted ceramics and flawless surfaces gives his works an ambiguous presence, oscillating between sculpture, collectible object, contemporary idol, and pop icon.
Behind their playful appearance, his sculptures examine the construction of desire and the performance of identity in an image-driven society. Balancing humor with psychological depth, Spirito invites viewers to reflect on the fragile boundary between attraction, fantasy, and self-representation.
Rinaldo Hopf
Rinaldo Hopf (born 1955, Freiburg, Germany) is a visual artist, photographer, editor, and curator whose multidisciplinary practice explores queer identity, desire, portraiture, and cultural memory.
Over the course of his career, Hopf has worked as an artist in San Francisco and Paris, as an art therapist in forensic institutions in San Francisco and Berlin.
Based between Berlin, Tuscany, and Los Angeles, Hopf has participated in numerous international artist residencies and grands including at Tom of Finland foundation.
Alongside his artistic practice, he is the editor of the acclaimed Mein schwules Auge / My Gay Eye anthology and the author of several publications, including Subversiv, Amore, and Trickster.
For ICONS OF DESIRE, Hopf presents a portrait of Al Parker from his ongoing Golden Queers series. Celebrating influential figures in queer cultural history, the series pays tribute to personalities who have shaped generations of gay visual culture.
Stuart Sandford
Stuart Sandford, is a multidisciplinary artist based between London, Los Angeles and Mexico City. Working across (and often combining) different media, including photography, sculpture, painting, moving image, and installation, he has exhibited his work widely in galleries and museums around the world, notably the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and Centre de la Photographie, Genève.
His work has been featured in numerous publications, and is in many notable collections including the Sir Elton John and David Furnish Photography Collection, the Ömer Koç Collection, the Rennie Collection and the collection of the Tom of Finland Foundation. Sandford is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Sweatmother
Sweatmother (he/him) is an artist and filmmaker. His moving image work blends performance, self-recorded documentation, internet and archival footage in order to explore and make visible queer lived experiences. Experimental techniques are often incorporated throughout his work such as the triple baked method, an original image making technique using a video synthesizer.
Sweatmother seeks to create art for his community to share, learn from and find solace in sensitive depictions of their shared raw realities and obscured histories. He continues to develop his visual art practice alongside his collaborations and lived experiences, proposing new ways the world can interact with otherness.
Sweat experiments with interventions against forgetting within his archival project Otherness Archive, an accessible online-based archive.
Yinon Avior Philipsohn
Yinon Avior Philipsohn is a Copenhagen-based multidisciplinary artist working across photography, sculpture, installation, performance, and moving image. Through processes of cutting, sewing, layering, and assembling photographs, he transforms personal narratives into tactile, sculptural works that explore memory, migration, queer identity, spirituality, and the relationship between body and place.
His practice blurs the boundaries between image and object, creating poetic compositions that invite multiple readings. Avior has exhibited internationally and lives and works in Copenhagen.
Montien was selected as Artist-in-Residence at Tom of Finland Foundation in 2026.
Yinon Avior Philipsohn - Tom of Finland Residency
Yinon Avior Philipsohn Website
Yinon Avior Philipsohn Instagram
Yves de Brabander
Yves de Brabander, is a Belgian photographer and visual artist whose work explores masculinity, vulnerability, sexuality, and identity through a distinctive blend of fine art photography and classical references. Drawing inspiration from Old Master paintings, religious iconography, and queer culture, his images challenge conventional ideas of desire, power, and the male body.