8 Queer Artists Capturing Love And Intimacy, And Challenging Oppression

More than ever, there is a bounty of LGBTIA+ artists capturing the complexity of queerness, sexuality, and gender. These artists work in a variety of modes, from abstract painting to NFTs, to challenge the historical obscuring of queerness in art and to celebrate their gender and sexual identities.

This growing community of artists is inventing a new visual language to depict love and intimacy, often leaning into ambiguity. Painter TM Davy looks to water as a recurring motif while Doron Langberg’s paintings straddle the line between abstraction and figuration. Hannah Roemer is remaking art-historical portraiture by depicting lesbians, who have long been made invisible, and Prince Jacon Osinachi is challenging expectations of Nigerian men.

Though their subjects and methods are diverse, all of these artists are connected through their depictions and evocations of queer mystery: the idea that queerness exists beyond societal assumptions in an ambigous space full of fluidity and indeterminancy. This can be seen in the artists’ rendering of nudity and love as when two desiring queer bodies find intimacy beyond explicit sexual contact. 

Read on to see how these 8 queer artists are rewriting how we understand sensuality, love, and mystery.