Drawing a Circle

Installation view of "Images." Photography by Melania Dalle Grave. Image courtesy of the Estate of Larry Stanton and Apalazzo Gallery.

Larry Stanton sketched compulsively throughout his brief life. The artist couldn’t help but draw his surroundings, his friends, and his lovers. After he moved to New York City from upstate New York in the 1960s, he committed his craft to the young men around him, and so chronicled their intimate inner and outer worlds. When his life was cut short at 37 at the start of the AIDS crisis, he left behind an intimate mapping of his community, charted by faces. Forty years later, his work is on view at his first-ever retrospective, “Images,” at Apalazzo Gallery in Brescia, Italy, through January 6, 2025. In addition to portraits done in colored pencil, crayon, pastel, ink, watercolor, oil, and acrylic, the show also includes photos Stanton took of himself as well as his close friend and mentor David Hockney, along with intimate Super 8 footage from various queer havens in the ‘70s, including Fire Island.

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In Stanton’s portraits, his peers’ skin has a youthful pigment; their eyes are distinctly almond-shaped, and they never reveal too much. Upon first look, the young man drawn in Duncan Tucker, 1981, seems simple: He looks directly at his viewer, and his curly hair falls in his face. His brown eyes are set deep with pink and light blue hues, and his boyish face is lengthened by peachy shading. Tucker is beautiful, surely, but he also possesses a weight that bears down on his expression and forces his mouth closed. Plus, there is a depth to his eyes. In Stanton’s other images, which include gallerist and curator Henry Geldzahler and painter Ross Bleckner, the subjects are rendered with a tender and knowing gaze, painted at the same time the AIDS crisis began to dawn over the entirety of the artist’s circle.

Larry Stanton, Self-portrait, n.d. Image courtesy of the Estate of Larry Stanton and Apalazzo Gallery.

At the time of his death, Stanton had only shown in galleries a handful of times. Afterward, his partner and mentor Arthur Lambert kept his remaining work in his apartment in Greenwich Village for nearly 40 years until theater director and stage designer Fabio Cherstich reached out after discovering Stanton’s portraits in 2018 while researching the painter Patrick Angus. Under Lambert’s guidance, the two sifted through the late artist’s work and resolved to find it a wider audience, a long-held ambition of Lambert’s. A few years later, they did exactly that. Together, the duo founded the Estate of Larry Stanton. In 2020, they presented Stanton’s first posthumous exhibition with Apalazzo online, and then staged a second show the next year with the Daniel Cooney Fine Art Gallery in New York. In 2022, Cherstich curated a presentation of Stanton’s colorful sketches with Acne Studios, which coincided with a capsule collection the label released that featured his images printed on two cotton t-shirts, a scarf, a blanket, and two lamps. In the same year, the pair edited Larry Stanton: Think of Me When It Thunders, which was published by Apartamento and includes 139 artworks as well as writings from Hockney, Geldzaher, and other close friends who felt both his life and loss deeply. 

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Today at Apalazzo, Stanton’s work continues to emerge from obscurity to join the ranks of his peers. The Italian gallery’s retrospective presents the artist as a young man who feverishly documented his world. Four decades later, his sensitive portraiture of the many men who would be affected by AIDS persists. Together, these images chronicle the exuberant beauty and interpersonal dynamics of New York’s gay community.

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"Images" is on view through January 06, 2025 at Apalazzo Gallery at Piazza Tebaldo Brusato, 35 - 25121 Brescia, Italy.