6 Contemporary Practices That Explore The LGBTQ+ Experience in Art
July 2, 2025
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
At the opening of Art Basel 2025, a quiet electric tension pulsed through the crowd as a figure stepped onto a raised platform. Tight silver shorts on, bathed in the bright light of the grid-like white cube of every art fair, the dancer began to move. For fifteen minutes, his body was both spectacle and ghost, a vessel for desire and vulnerability. And then he disappeared. In this ephemeral gesture that goes by the name of Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform), 1991, by Félix González-Torres evoked a legacy of queer resistance and mourning, folding absence and eroticism into a minimalist form that continues to reverberate decades after it was first conceived.
To speak of LGBTQ+ art is not to refer to a narrow genre or siloed identity: many of the most iconic gestures in contemporary art have roots in queer experience. Often, these works are so powerful, so aesthetically disruptive, that they’re absorbed into the visual culture at large, their queer origins rendered secondary or even invisible. Queer artists have long held a mirror up to power, to beauty, to the politics of visibility. Still, in doing so, their works have also become part of a broader aesthetic language, endlessly quoted, remixed, recontextualised.
That’s why it’s vital to return to the artists themselves, not only as the symbols they have disseminated in culture. Here, we gather a constellation of queer artists whose work spans from the bold, to the iconic and canonical, to the unexpectedly intimate.
Bruce LaBruce
Bruce LaBruce, a pivotal figure of the Queercore movement, blends punk rebellion and unapologetic gay eroticism in his work. His debut feature No Skin Off My Ass (1991) intertwines a tender punk romance between a hair stylist and a skinhead. In interviews, LaBruce has emphasized his celebrations of nuanced and impossible to define queer identities, with his works making him one of the most controversial gay artists in the art world. Subsequent works, such as his visual anthology Revolution Is My Boyfriend (2023) confronts societal taboos head-on, marrying shock with romance to affirm queer lives in their full complexity.
Louis Fratino
One of the biggest names in the current art world (and commercial fairs) landscape, Louis Fratino’s paintings are tender homages to modern queer domesticity, capturing love, memory, and everyday eroticism. Critics compare Fratino to Picasso and Freud, highlighting how Fratino’s practice is set to become a classic in the next couple of years. His painting An Argument (2021), portraying an intimate and fragile scene of two men sleeping away from each other after an argument that temporarily separated them, has been described as the most magnetic work of the 2024 Venice Biennale, positioning the artist as one of the most promising in the contemporary art scene.
Genesis P. Orridge & Lady Jaye
Genesis Breyer P‑Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P‑Orridge were famous for their musical experiments with the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, where they continuously mixed music making with performance art: one inspired by the beat generation and strong personalities like William Burroughs (and its cut-up technique) and Anton LaVey. Starting in 1993, they started the Pandrogeny Project: they began to have surgeries to look like each other, and described themselves as one “pandrogynous” being. This big piece of performance art, where life and art bled into each other, is still considered one of the most incredible artworks about challenging the societal norms of what love should be. Their story is portrayed in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which received the Teddy award at Berlinale for its intimate portrayal. Despite both Lady Jaye’s passing in 2007 and Genesis P. Orridge’s recent death in 2020, their revolutionary ideas continue to thrive through the devoted followers of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, who carry forward the radical spirit of pandrogeny, gender fluidity, and collaborative identity.
Agnes Questionmark
Born in Rome in 1995, Agnes Questionmark’s practice spans performance, sculpture, video, and installation, interrogating the boundaries of genetics and biomodifications through experiments, surgical operations, and artificial reproductive processes, challenging normative conceptions of identity. Her performances, such as CHM13hTERT (2023) and TRANSGENESIS (2021), explore themes of transformation and fluidity, embodying hybrid creatures that defy classification. Her practice is a continuous confrontation against the pathologisation and mechanisation of transgender bodies, highlighting the biopolitical implications of gender in a human-dominated world. Always shifting between different projects and identities, Agnes’ work perfectly encapsulates many of the most poignant themes and artistic languages in 21st-century culture: non-human forms of intelligence, body horror, and non-fixated identities.
Carlos Motta
Colombian-American artist Carlos Motta’s multidisciplinary work explores issues of gender, sexuality, and political identity: his projects often interrogate the histories and narratives of LGBTQ+ communities, focusing on the intersections of queerness with colonialism and migration. His solo show Pleas of Resistance is currently ongoing at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), showing a wide range of video works like the piece Nefandus (2013): a trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism. His project, The Crossing, a commission of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, presents video portraits of eleven LGBTQI+ refugees who speak about their experiences before, during and after the exodus from their homelands to the Netherlands.
Ryan Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin’s work perfectly captures the shifting nature of queer identity in influenced by a media matured world, virtual landscapes and the internet: Through chaotic editing and surreal identity-shifting characters, Trecartin reflects the futility of labels, names and language in favor of a media-infused fluidity. In one of his most famous films, I-Be Area (2007), he uses fast-paced dialogue and exaggerated performances to echo the fragmented logic of digital culture, crafting characters who constantly reinvent themselves, adopt multiple personas, and treat identity as something flexible and performative rather than fixed.
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