Kurt Kauper

I went to hear Kurt Kauper lecture last night at SFAI. I definitely was a little nervous looking at his work. He said that that was his intention but by painting nude self-portraits and saying that all of his nude hockey players are him from the waist down, I was kind of speechless. He spoke about how he wanted to challenge the role of the male nude as being simply an example of homoerotism and into a form of admiration and respect. Yet his own professed idolization and obsession with Bobby Orr, (the Boston Bruins hockey player) was admittedly his childhood love. I really liked how he drew the parallel of how boys' sport collecting cards, are actually the size and shape of locket portraits. That the hyper-masculine sport idols are kind of doled out to these young boys in a kind of love relationship that challenges the boundaries of male gender roles. 

www.kurtkauper.com