Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland

This bold catalogue brings together the work of two cultural icons for the very firsttime: Beryl Cook (1926–2008) and Tom of Finland (1920–1991). It was inspired by the2024 exhibition Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland at Studio Voltaire in London. Beryl Cook was a painter renowned for her exuberant style and descriptions of everydaylife. Her work captures the social milieu of the areas she lived in and visited, notablyPlymouth. Her most enduring images are of larger-than-life women carousing innightclubs, eating in cafés or enjoying ribald hen parties, rendered in graphic andcolourful forms. Cook’s work came to prominence in the mid-1970s and she quicklybecame known as one of Britain’s best-loved artists, highly recognised for her distinctiveworks, which are both celebratory and provocative. Tom of Finland’s pioneering depictions of homosexual machismo in his images ofbikers, soldiers, cowboys, sailors and labourers broadly represent queer, leather andmuscle communities. A master draughtsman, he used his works to give form to animaginative universe that, in turn, helped fuel real-world liberation movements and hadsignificant influence on a wide range of cultural figures including the Village People,Freddie Mercury, Jean Paul Gaultier and Robert Mapplethorpe. Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland puts their work into conversation for the first time. Thepairing is perhaps unexpected, yet immediate and compelling relationships betweentheir practices are evident. Fundamentally, both artists employed a sustained andcoherent way of hyper-realising the body in images that celebrate pleasure and denyshame. Together, their works reveal interconnected ideas surrounding sexuality, gender,taste and class. Artist and writer Huw Lemmey has contributed an incisive new essay exploringthe queer contexts inherent to Tom of Finland’s work, but that also finds latentresonance in Cook’s paintings of gay bars and shapely women. He further considersthe commercial forms of distribution that made their complex bodies of works highlyaccessible. Spanning five decades of paintings, drawings and archival materials, this companioncatalogue contributes to new readings of the artists’ practices and their enduring impacton popular culture.

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