DRAKE CARR
MENSWEAR

May 2nd - June 23rd, 2024

FIERMAN presents Menswear, a solo exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Drake Carr. Comprising new drawings and collages, Carr’s Menswear examines the myriad ways in which artifice shapes, protects, complicates, and defines  selfhood. Carr pulls disparate imagery and ideas from gay pornography, Christian iconography, fashion illustration, and queer theory to engender a glamorous and gritty visual realm in which the twin stars of empowerment and objectification elude and embrace each other in a drunken dance of sublimity and degradation. 

The male figure stands at the center of Menswear.  In Torch, a large scale drawing in colored pencil on paper, Carr depicts a male nude from behind. The figure fuses classical Grecian aesthetic idealism with comic book omnipotence. The impenetrability of his perfect musculature is belied by his open-backed, glittering stiletto, an Apollonian ideal brought to heel and commanded to dance.   In Gay Bar Collage 3 - The Closet, a large scale collage, Carr dresses studs culled from vintage gay pornographic magazines in brightly colored outfits and situates them in a fantasy gay bar. The outlandish clothing becomes a gesture towards humanizing and re-eroticizing the nameless models, lending them a second chance at aesthetic immortality.  

Tony, a second large scale figure drawing depicting a fashionably dressed contemporary man, continues Carr’s celebrated Walk-ins series of portraits done from life, previously created and exhibited in New York and Paris.  Like Liotard and Toulouse-Lautrec before him, Carr has an exquisite eye for the humanity of his subjects and an ability to capture formally the effervescence of the demimonde.

Smaller framed works on paper, both collaged and drawn, provide a more personal glimpse into Carr’s aesthetic cosmology.  Joseph’s Coat depicts an exquisitely drawn, loosely draped garment, itself a relic of a previous sculptural installation (Joseph Emerges From the Well, 2018) a sparkling iteration of the biblical Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors. The coat is a stand-in for an absent figure, a glittering armor of singularity, a peacock’s plumage plucked.  Carr is directly referencing the 1998 television musical version of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, a fixture of his deeply Christian upbringing and an object of his early gay longing. A found, hand-worn prayer card of Jesus Christ gets an aesthetic overhaul via a translucent overlay with drawn cosmetic enhancements.  

Drake Carr (born 1993, Flint, Michigan) lives and works in New York. He has exhibited across the United States and internationally, showing with Artists Space, New York Life Gallery, Fierman Gallery, and Paris’s Galerie Mariposa, among others.