Toxic masculinity seems to be spreading through the air lately like clouds of pollen. Men who previously spent their time yelling for a living are now in charge of everything from national security to national parks. In art, feminists have pushed back against the male gaze for decades, but it still permeates social and traditional media.
Larry Bowling‘s work manages to escape that overly macho context while maintaining a perspective that is tender and thoughtful, yet unmistakably masculine. In his solo show, on view through June 29 at J. Langdon in Montpelier, Bowling presents mixed-media oil paintings and a series of transparency collages in Lucite boxes.
Bowling, 70, is gay, and his identity informs themes of the male body as both idealized and fallible. Pieces such as “As in a Swoon” and “Homage to Michelangelo” feature nude models whose six-pack abs, defined by deep shadows, could indeed have been carved by the queer Renaissance master.
Conversely, age has softened figures in “The Embrace” and “Come Walk With Me,” an intimately sized transparency collage not much bigger than a Polaroid photo. The latter’s stacked images blur the body just slightly, lending it a sense of motion; more naturalistic, less dramatic lighting gives it an honest, vulnerable quality.
These works convey physicality in their making as well as their subjects. Rather than affixing his collages with glue, Bowling uses patinaed copper tacks to pin together piles of transparent sheets, creating a sense of accumulated history.
The paintings incorporate photographic images, too, often illuminated by loose drawing carved into thick oil paint as sgraffito — usually a bright line showing through a dark surface. Bowling carries the same kind of marks into the collages as twirling copper wires wrapped around the tacks, suspended over the surface.
Some of the paintings, such as “Narcissus,” feature images covered with thin sheets of mica, nailed into place. The brittle, glittery material adds a sense of time, nostalgia and memory to the works. Bowling’s poetic sensibility, loud and clear in his choice of materials, also comes through in a few portraits. Images of gay poets, philosophers and activists — Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, Jean Cocteau and Vaslav Nijinsky among them — populate this work as much as do more anonymous bodies.
One stand-alone piece, “Book of Remembering,” acts as a memorial altar to LGBTQ figures from the past. Bowling has mounted a book onto a painting, its open pages covered in dozens of overlapping photos. Some are easily identified: Harvey Milk, Marsha P. Johnson and prisoners marked with a pink triangle — which, though later reclaimed as a pride symbol, was first used by the Nazis to identify gay men and trans women.
Ribbons with names attached dangle from the book. Some are familiar, such as Alan Turing and Oscar Wilde, both charged criminally for their sexuality; others less so, such as “Juan Ramon Guerrero, 22” and “Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, 24,” both of whom were killed in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. Still others are unnamed, such as “20698 Auschwitz.”
It’s a remarkable piece, one that calls to mind powerful visual responses to the AIDS epidemic by artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Robert Mapplethorpe. That work, like Bowling’s, creates empathy by reminding us that everyone inhabits a body — and we’re all equally vulnerable.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Masc Mandate: Larry Bowling in Montpelier”
This article appears in The Food Issue 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
