After mounting a successful exhibition called Floating Leaf in 2012 at the Urbanspace Gallery, Toronto’s Allen Shugar is back with more captivating images of male nudes with Some Boys I’d Like to Know.
Urbanspace’s Calvin Hambrook describes Shugar’s works as exploring “the mystique of the male figure as an object of attraction. While the artist uses oil on canvas as tribute to the history of art, the male subject matter is the artist’s somewhat whimsical attempt to help redress the imbalance in Western art that saw the female image come to predominate (particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries), and become the ideal and only gender thought ‘proper’ to be represented in an erotically charged fashion.”
“The figures in the show are all invented, rather than representative of any actual people,” Shugar says. “What could be more stimulating than to create in Pygmalion style the fantasy male that embodies your own desire of the moment?” he asks.
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