Opening Reception: Friday, January 5th, 2024, 6-8pm

Auxier Kline is pleased to announce the opening of Queer Naturalism, an exhibition featuring new paintings by contemporary artists, Paul Anagnostopoulos, Stephen Bron, Robert Martin, and Tin Nguyen.  

Queer Naturalism brings together four painters whose practices intersect in their investigations of queer identity in nature.  According to the philosophy of Naturalism, all beings and events in the universe are considered natural. This encompasses everything, regardless of its inherent characteristics.  The artists included in the exhibition have created works of art that view nature from the queer perspective, and celebrate their place in the natural world.

Paul Anagnostopoulos’s paintings push back against homophobia by celebrating queer intimacy and storytelling. The scene’s players are lifted from ancient art, life drawing, and gay erotica from the late seventies through the nineties—a moment when a powerful gay identity emerged in response to the beginnings of the AIDS crisis. By combining these visuals with ancient ones set in nature, he encourages the viewer to meditate on queer history and focus on a neglected perspective. 

Stephen Bron’s paintings in the exhibition depict male subjects having surreal interactions with their environments, melding into the landscape or each other. The experience of looking at these paintings that oscillate between abstraction and figuration invites the viewer to connect to the artist's interest in the psychology of memory and how we experience time, as well as our relationship to nature, which constantly reminds us of its transience and our own.

Artist Robert Martin’s awareness of their own queerness blossomed as they observed the diverse and unusual aspects of plant and animal life in the Wisconsin woods during their childhood. Martin has beautifully depicted anomalies such as a six-leaf clover and an asymmetrical pair of orchids that act as symbols for queerness, both in their work, and in flora and fauna.  

Tin Nguyen’s paintings are a collection of quiet moments—feelings scaffolded over time. He engages his experiences as an embodied individual using his senses and intuition to evoke emotional subtleties out of the mundane. Flowers are feelings, and a sense of longing becomes landscapes. Nguyen weaves into these natural scenes explorations of queer identity, intimacy, and vulnerability.