THE UNCERTAIN MALE BODY

And yet there is a complication.

The ideal male body was never only an active symbol of masculine power. It was also something to be looked at.

This is where the historical image becomes less stable than it first appears.

Begiato's research deliberately complicates the assumption that the idealised male body was only a bearer of gendered authority. Beautiful and virile male bodies could also function as objects of admiration and desire, including for both female and male viewers. The same body could therefore occupy two positions at once: active as the carrier of masculine values but passive as the object of someone else's gaze (Begiato, 2020).

That tension matters.

A body designed to signify control can still be consumed visually.

A body meant to represent authority can still become vulnerable to interpretation.

A body intended to define masculinity can still produce desires that exceed the meaning assigned to it.

This is why the history of the male body is not quite a story in which certainty existed first and ambiguity arrived later.

The ambiguity was already there.

What changed was the extent to which art was prepared to expose it.

The masculine body of the past often appeared stable because the culture surrounding it worked hard to make it appear so. Institutions, social expectations and visual conventions repeatedly connected particular forms of embodiment with particular ideas of manhood. Over time, the associations could become so familiar that the construction itself disappeared from view.

The body seemed simply to mean what it meant.

Strength meant masculinity.

Control meant masculinity.

Heroism meant masculinity.

To be upright, capable and self-contained was not merely to possess a certain body. It was to inhabit a position within a broader cultural idea of what a man ought to be.

And this may be the more useful way to understand masculine certainty.

It was not a natural condition waiting to be depicted by art.

It was something art helped produce.

That distinction becomes important when we turn to the contemporary male body, because the apparent instability we see now may not mean that masculinity has suddenly lost a meaning it once securely possessed.

It may mean that the mechanisms that once made one meaning appear dominant have become easier to see.

The body has not necessarily become uncertain.

Perhaps we have simply become more aware of how much certainty was being asked of it.

THE BODY THAT KNEW WHAT IT MEANT

For much of the history of Western art, the male body appears to know exactly what it is doing.

It stands upright. It carries weight. It fights, labours, conquers, and protects. Its muscles are not merely anatomical; they are signs. Strength becomes discipline. Proportion becomes order. Physical control becomes evidence of moral control. The body does not simply belong to a man. It helps explain what a man is supposed to be.

This is one reason the male body has proved so useful to cultures trying to make masculinity visible.

From the idealised bodies of classical sculpture to the heroic figures of history painting, from soldiers and athletes to workers represented as embodiments of labour and endurance, masculinity has repeatedly been translated into posture, physique and gesture. The body becomes a kind of argument. Broad shoulders, controlled movement, physical capability and upright bearing can make abstract qualities such as courage, authority or self-command appear almost self-evident.

But the apparent certainty of these bodies should not be confused with something natural or timeless.

Masculinity has never simply resided in muscle, height or proportion. Cultures have attached meaning to those forms, taught viewers how to interpret them and used images to repeat those associations until they begin to look inevitable.

In her study of British manliness between 1760 and 1900, historian Joanne Begiato describes precisely this process. Bodies associated with soldiers, sailors, boxers, blacksmiths and other physically powerful men were used to communicate desirable qualities of manliness. Physical beauty and virility could be connected to bravery, self-command, moral worth and social usefulness. The body helped turn gender into something that could be seen (Begiato, 2020).

Just as importantly, the opposite could also be written onto the body.

Begiato shows how nineteenth-century ideas of unmanliness were frequently associated with bodies understood as uncontrolled, degraded or insufficiently disciplined. Excessive appetite, drunkenness, illness and certain forms of sexual behaviour could be represented not merely as personal failings but as failures of masculine self-mastery. The body became both proof and warning: control could make manliness visible; its apparent absence could make unmanliness visible too (Begiato, 2020).

The result was not simply an aesthetic ideal.

It was a visual grammar.

A viewer did not need to be told that one body represented strength and another weakness, that one posture suggested command and another submission, that a disciplined physique could stand for a disciplined character. Those meanings had already been rehearsed through painting, sculpture, popular illustration, advertising, sport and public culture.

The body does not simply belong to a man.
It helps explain what a man is supposed to be.

WHO IS LOOKING AT THE MAN?

To look at a body is never entirely neutral.

The moment a body is placed before us — painted, sculpted, photographed or projected onto a screen — a relationship begins between the person represented and the person doing the looking. We notice posture, skin, clothing, muscle, and gesture. We interpret confidence or vulnerability. We may admire the body, compare ourselves with it, desire it or reject what it appears to represent.

The male body is no exception.

Yet discussions of looking in visual culture have often been shaped by a familiar arrangement: the man looks and the woman is looked at.

The most influential formulation came from film theorist Laura Mulvey, whose 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema described how mainstream cinema frequently organised looking around an active male spectator and a female figure constructed as spectacle. Mulvey's argument concerned narrative cinema rather than all visual culture, but the concept of the male gaze travelled far beyond its original context, becoming one of the most influential ways of thinking about gender, power and spectatorship (Mulvey, 1975).

The model remains powerful.

But the male body presents it with an interesting problem.

What happens when the man becomes the spectacle?

Art has never lacked male bodies offered for viewing. Classical sculpture exposed them with extraordinary anatomical attention. Renaissance artists studied, idealised and multiplied them. Athletes, saints, soldiers, martyrs and mythological heroes provided culturally legitimate reasons for displaying male flesh.

The body could be naked without necessarily surrendering its authority.

Indeed, nudity could strengthen it.

Muscle communicated capability. Proportion suggested perfection. The exposed body of the hero could appear more powerful precisely because there was nothing between the viewer and the physical evidence of his strength.

But visibility creates a contradiction.

To make masculine power visible, the body has to be displayed.

And a displayed body can be looked at in ways its makers cannot completely control.

The heroic body may invite admiration for courage or physical discipline. It may also invite attention to the curve of a torso, the surface of skin, the shape of a thigh or the tension of muscle. The same visual qualities that communicate strength can produce sensual pleasure. The difference between admiring the masculine ideal and desiring the male body that embodies it is not always easy to police.

This ambiguity is not merely a contemporary reinterpretation imposed upon historical images.

As we have already seen, Joanne Begiato's research into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British manliness demonstrates that beautiful and virile male bodies could attract both female and male admiration and desire. Masculine beauty was culturally productive precisely because it could be looked at: the body communicated character through its appearance, but in doing so it also made itself available to other forms of attention (Begiato, 2020).

The gaze therefore complicates the distinction between power and objectification.

Being looked at does not automatically make a man powerless. Nor does being desired erase his masculinity. But it changes the relationship between body and viewer. The man who appears self-contained within the image is no longer entirely self-contained once someone else begins to interpret him.

Fig. 1. Robert Mapplethorpe, Bob Love, 1979

Fig. 2. Rotimi Fani-Kayode — Every Moment Counts (Ecstatic Antibodies), 1989

Fig. 3. Laura Stevens — him series, 2011–2012

Fig. 4. John Coplans, Self-Portrait (Frieze No. 2, Four Panels), 1994

This becomes particularly visible in modern visual culture.

Photography, fashion, advertising, bodybuilding and cinema dramatically expanded the circulation of idealised male bodies. The muscular physique became commercially useful: it could sell clothing, health, sport, discipline, aspiration and sex. Men were increasingly encouraged not only to inhabit a masculine body but also to observe it — and observe themselves — as an image.

The body becomes something to construct.

Something to maintain.

Something to compare.

Something to display.

And this creates an unusual double position for masculinity.

A man may be asked to build a body that signifies power while simultaneously making that body attractive enough to be consumed visually.

He is expected to be the subject of his body and, increasingly, its curator.

This contradiction becomes especially revealing when queer spectatorship enters the frame.

A muscular male body may have been created to represent an apparently conventional masculine ideal, but the image cannot determine who will desire it. The photograph does not know whether the person looking at it is heterosexual, gay, bisexual, male, female or unwilling to fit neatly into any of those categories.

Nor can the image dictate what pleasure the viewer will take from it.

Research into fashion imagery has demonstrated precisely this instability. Representations of highly muscular masculinity can simultaneously reproduce conventional masculine ideals and make the male body available to queer readings. What appears on one level to confirm normative masculinity can, through pose, styling, exposure and spectatorship, create another visual possibility entirely (Brajato and Dhoest, 2022).

The body remains the same.

The meaning changes with the gaze.

Contemporary queer photography makes that instability increasingly difficult to ignore.

The work of photographer Spyros Rennt, who is also represented in ANDROS, frequently places male bodies within scenes of intimacy, nightlife, friendship and sexuality. His photographs resist the idea that there must be a clean distinction between masculinity and vulnerability, dominance and receptivity, and friendship and eroticism. Bodies touch, recline, perform, expose themselves and look back.

What matters here is not simply that the men may be queer.

It is that queerness changes what the image permits us to see.

The male body no longer has to justify its visibility through heroism, athletic achievement, labour or some other culturally respectable demonstration of masculine purpose.

It can simply be available to attention.

To intimacy.

To desire.

And sometimes to uncertainty.

This changes the role of the viewer as well.

The question is no longer only:

What kind of man is this?

Another question begins to interfere with it:

What does my way of looking at him make him become?

A body photographed as masculine strength may become erotic through the viewer's attention. A body intended as erotic may appear vulnerable. A pose that one viewer reads as confidence may appear performative to another. Masculinity does not disappear in this exchange, but its meaning is no longer controlled entirely by the body being represented.

This is perhaps why the male gaze cannot simply be reversed.

Calling something a female gaze or a queer gaze can be useful, but replacing one spectator with another does not fully explain what happens when the male body becomes visible as an object. The more interesting transformation is that the distinction between the one who looks and the one who is looked at becomes less secure.

The man can occupy both positions.

He can desire and be desired.

Look and be looked at.

Perform masculinity and expose its performance at the same time.

And once that happens, the body begins to lose one of the qualities that made it such a convincing symbol of masculine certainty: the impression that it controls its own meaning.

Perhaps the most destabilising thing we can do to the masculine body is not to weaken it.

It is simply to keep looking at it.

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THE TORSO

A torso is a strange kind of body.

It is recognisably human, yet incomplete. Arms may be missing. Legs disappear. A face — the part through which we most readily search for identity — may not exist at all. What remains is the centre of the body: chest, abdomen, shoulders, the physical structure from which everything else seems to extend.

In a museum, we have learned to accept this incompleteness.

The broken bodies of antiquity rarely appear to us as failures. Time has removed limbs, damaged surfaces and erased identities, yet the fragment can acquire an authority of its own. We look at what survives and mentally imagine the body that once surrounded it.

The fragment points backwards towards an assumed whole.

Fig. 5. Apollonios, Belvedere Torso, c. 1st century BCE

But what if there is no whole to recover?

This is one of the more provocative ideas behind ANDROS — The Male Body in Contemporary Central European Art, the exhibition that opened at Prague's DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in September 2026. Bringing together around fifty artists from the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and the Visegrád countries, ANDROS begins with a familiar subject — the male body — but treats it less as an established form than as a place where established meanings have become difficult to maintain (DOX, 2026).

The exhibition's curatorial language returns repeatedly to the image of the torso.

But here the torso is more than an anatomical fragment.

It becomes a metaphor.

The exhibition describes contemporary society as having lost some of the shared frameworks through which individuals once understood their place within a larger whole. Established social roles have loosened, including those attached to gender, while individual identity has become increasingly open to negotiation. The contemporary person, in this reading, resembles a torso: recognisable, substantial, but no longer easily completed by a single inherited model (DOX, 2026).

For masculinity, the metaphor is particularly useful.

The traditional masculine ideal has often depended on the opposite condition.

Completeness.

The heroic body is composed. Its proportions make sense. Its posture communicates intention. The athlete controls his movement; the soldier controls fear; the worker controls physical effort. Even when such figures were imaginary ideals rather than descriptions of ordinary men, their visual power depended upon coherence.

The body seemed to know what it represented.

The contemporary torso interrupts that coherence.

Not because contemporary men have somehow become incomplete, but because the relationship between male anatomy and masculine meaning has become harder to treat as inevitable.

A chest is still a chest.

A shoulder remains a shoulder.

Muscle remains muscle.

But none of them can tell us, on their own, what kind of man inhabits the body.

This is where ANDROS becomes more interesting than an exhibition simply about representations of men.

Its artists do not offer one replacement for the heroic masculine ideal. The male figures reproduced in the exhibition materials are fragmented, solitary, intimate, theatrical, exposed, distorted and sometimes difficult to read. Works such as Thomas Riess's Idol (2017), Michal Czinege's Head 7 (2013), Ivan Pinkava's Loner (2015) and Ruprecht von Kaufmann's Couple on the Sofa (2019) do not resolve themselves into a single proposition about what contemporary masculinity has become (DOX, 2026).

Fig. 6. Thomas Riess, Idol, 2017

Fig. 7. Michal Czinege, Head 7, 2013

Fig. 8. Ivan Pinkava, Loner, 2015

Fig. 9. Ruprecht von Kaufmann, Couple on the Sofa, 2019

That absence of resolution matters.

It would be easy to tell a reassuring story in which an old, rigid masculinity has simply been replaced by a newer, more emotionally expressive one.

Strong becomes vulnerable.

Dominant becomes tender.

Heroic becomes ordinary.

But that would only exchange one template for another.

The more radical possibility is that the template itself is becoming less convincing.

A muscular body, for example, does not have to communicate dominance. It can be desired, disciplined, anxious, decorative or vulnerable. Nudity does not necessarily imply confidence. Exposure can produce power or remove it. A solitary figure may appear independent, but solitude can just as easily suggest isolation.

Even masculinity itself can occupy contradictory positions within the same body.

This is why the question “What does a man look like?” becomes surprisingly difficult.

Biology can describe aspects of a body. Clothing can signal gender conventions. Pose can invoke familiar cultural codes. Muscle can recall athletic or heroic ideals. But none of these provides a reliable instruction for how the person before us should be understood.

The viewer has to participate.

We bring assumptions about strength, sexuality, age, class, beauty, vulnerability and gender to the image. We read them against the body, sometimes finding confirmation and sometimes discovering that the body refuses to cooperate.

The uncertainty therefore exists not only inside the figure.

It exists between the figure and us.

And perhaps this is where the torso becomes especially powerful as a metaphor.

A classical torso asks us to imagine what has been lost.

A contemporary torso can ask whether the missing pieces were ever necessary for the body to have meaning in the first place.

The difference is subtle but profound.

One treats incompleteness as damage.

The other allows incompleteness to become possibility.

This also changes how we might understand the word uncertain.

Uncertainty is easily mistaken for confusion or crisis, particularly when discussions turn to masculinity. If the old roles no longer fit comfortably, the assumption is often that men have been left without direction — that something coherent has fractured and needs to be repaired.

But uncertainty can describe something else.

It can describe the moment when several meanings become possible where previously one was expected to dominate.

A body can be masculine without being invulnerable.

Beautiful without being ideal.

Strong without commanding.

Erotic without being offered to women.

Queer without surrendering masculinity.

Vulnerable without ceasing to be male.

The body has not stopped meaning.

It has become harder to make it mean only one thing.

Seen this way, the contemporary male torso is not simply the broken remnant of an older masculine ideal.

It may be evidence that the ideal was never as complete as it appeared.

The torso once suggested an ideal body interrupted.

In contemporary art, perhaps the interruption is the point.

STRONG ENOUGH TO BE VULNERABLE

There is a particular way the masculine body has learned to occupy space.

It stands.

Feet planted. Shoulders held. Chest open. The body is balanced, alert and capable of movement. Even at rest, it often appears ready to act.

There is nothing inherently masculine about standing upright. Yet visual culture has repeatedly made verticality part of the language through which masculine authority is expressed. Kings stand before subjects. Soldiers stand to attention. Athletes rise onto podiums. Workers are pictured beside the things they have built. Heroes rarely need somewhere to lie down.

The upright body suggests something beyond posture.

It suggests command.

To remain standing is to appear capable of supporting one's own weight.

And perhaps that is why the reclining male body can feel so unexpectedly different.

A body lying down has surrendered some of its control over space. It spreads rather than rises. It rests against something. Its weight is supported by a bed, a floor, a sofa, and another body. Muscles that might otherwise demonstrate tension can soften. Limbs fall into positions that would appear awkward or exposed if the figure were standing.

The body is no longer presenting itself primarily through what it can do.

It is simply there.

This apparently minor shift in posture has been explored by scholar Paisid Aramphongphan in Horizontal Together, his study of queer embodiment and performance around figures including Andy Warhol, Jack Smith and dancer Fred Herko in 1960s New York. Aramphongphan pays particular attention to bodies that recline, lounge, collapse or refuse the upright posture conventionally associated with productive and socially disciplined life. Horizontality becomes more than physical orientation: it opens another way of thinking about bodies that do not continually demonstrate usefulness, control or mastery (Aramphongphan, 2021).

For the male body, that refusal carries particular weight.

Masculinity has long been associated not simply with physical strength but with self-sufficiency.

The ideal man controls his body, his emotions and his circumstances. He provides rather than requires. Protects rather than seeks protection. Supports rather than needs to be supported. Even vulnerability is often permitted only after it has been translated into another masculine achievement: the courage to admit weakness, the strength to ask for help, and the bravery to show emotion.

The language gives the game away.

A man can be vulnerable, but first vulnerability must prove that it is strong enough to belong to him.

Contemporary art can interrupt this bargain.

It can show a male body without requiring that its exposure become heroic.

A man may be tired without overcoming tiredness.

Lonely without transforming loneliness into resilience.

Tender without tenderness becoming evidence of moral courage.

Passive without secretly preparing to take control.

Afraid without the image promising that fear will eventually be conquered.

This distinction matters because vulnerability is easily turned into another masculine performance.

The emotionally available man can become as prescriptive an ideal as the stoic man he was supposed to replace. He must be strong but sensitive. Muscular but gentle. Confident but self-aware. Protective but never controlling. Emotionally articulate but never overwhelmed.

The template changes.

The demand to perform correctly remains.

If contemporary representations of masculinity are genuinely opening something new, their significance may therefore lie not in replacing strength with vulnerability, but in allowing the two to stop behaving like opposites.

A muscular body can be dependent.

A physically powerful man can be frightened.

An ageing body can remain desirable.

A naked body can appear uncertain.

A man receiving care does not cease to be masculine because someone else is holding his weight.

This is where the apparently simple distinction between active and passive begins to unravel.

Passivity has often carried a particularly uncomfortable relationship with masculinity because it appears to reverse the position men are expected to occupy. To act is to exercise agency. To receive is to allow something to happen to you. The distinction extends far beyond posture into work, sexuality, relationships and even the language through which bodies are described.

But a passive body is not necessarily a powerless one.

Nor is dependence the opposite of autonomy.

Every body depends.

On food. On sleep. On shelter. On touch. On other people. On environments capable of sustaining it. The fantasy of complete masculine self-sufficiency therefore asks the male body to conceal one of the most ordinary facts of being human.

We survive through relationships.

Fig. 10. Filippino Lippi, Pietà, c. 1500

Fig. 11. Thomas Eakins, Reclining Male Nude (Bill Duckett), 1887–92

Fig. 12. Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures, 1963

Fig. 13. Lucian Freud, Naked Man with Rat, 1977–78

Fig. 14. Ron Mueck, Dead Dad, 1996–97

Fig. 15. Louis Fratino, Four Poster Bed, 2021

Art can make those relationships visible.

A reclining figure reveals the surface supporting him. Two bodies touching make proximity part of the image. Illness makes care visible. Age makes time visible. Desire makes the presence of another person imaginable even when that person remains outside the frame.

The supposedly self-contained masculine body begins to acquire dependencies.

And those dependencies need not diminish it.

This is one reason works such as Ruprecht von Kaufmann's Couple on the Sofa (2019), included in ANDROS, are useful within the exhibition's broader examination of the male body. The sofa itself matters. It belongs to a domestic landscape rather than the monumental spaces traditionally associated with heroic masculinity. Bodies share furniture, weight and proximity. The male figure exists within a relationship rather than standing apart as an autonomous symbol (DOX, 2026).

Ivan Pinkava's photography approaches vulnerability differently. Across his wider practice, the human figure frequently appears stripped of the conventional signs through which social status and identity are stabilised. Bodies can seem isolated, fragile or suspended somewhere between beauty and mortality. In Loner (2015), selected for ANDROS, even the title directs us away from the heroic collective identities historically available to men — soldier, worker, athlete — towards solitude (DOX, 2026).

But vulnerability does not have one appearance.

This is important.

It would be easy to develop a new visual vocabulary in which a reclining man signifies vulnerability just as mechanically as an upright man once signified authority. Art becomes more interesting precisely when those equations fail.

A man can recline arrogantly.

A standing figure can be terrified.

Muscle can protect or imprison.

Nudity can liberate or expose.

Touch can comfort or threaten.

The meaning lies not in a single gesture, but in the relationship between body, context and viewer.

What contemporary art can loosen is the expectation that all of these relationships must eventually return the male body to control.

Perhaps he does not have to stand back up.

Perhaps weakness does not need to become a lesson.

Perhaps dependence does not require redemption.

Perhaps vulnerability is not valuable because it makes masculinity stronger.

Perhaps it is valuable because it makes masculinity less afraid of being human.

And that may be the more radical transformation.

The uncertain male body does not need to abandon strength.

It needs to abandon the idea that strength is the price of admission.

Art can make those relationships visible.

A reclining figure reveals the surface supporting him. Two bodies touching make proximity part of the image. Illness makes care visible. Age makes time visible. Desire makes the presence of another person imaginable even when that person remains outside the frame.

The supposedly self-contained masculine body begins to acquire dependencies.

And those dependencies need not diminish it.

A man can be vulnerable, but first vulnerability must prove that it is strong enough to belong to him.

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THE QUEER BODY DOES NOT NEED PERMISSION

There is a temptation to describe the queer male body as an alternative.

An alternative to heterosexual masculinity. To the heroic body. To the disciplined athlete, the soldier, the worker, the husband, the father. In this version of the story, conventional masculinity occupies the centre and queer bodies arrive later, asking to be included around its edges.

But this gives the centre too much authority.

Queer art can do something more disruptive than introduce different kinds of men into an existing visual language.

It can expose the language itself.

If masculinity has historically been communicated through posture, clothing, gesture, strength, occupation and the direction of desire, then queerness reveals how dependent those signs are on agreement. A gesture appears masculine because we have learned to read it that way. A posture becomes effeminate because another set of meanings has been attached to it. Even desire becomes part of the body's social interpretation: whom a man touches, how he touches them and whether he allows himself to be touched can change how his masculinity is perceived.

The queer body enters this system and refuses to behave reliably.

It can be muscular without confirming heterosexual masculinity.

Effeminate without ceasing to be male.

Dominant and receptive.

Tender and sexual.

Masculine and decorative.

It can borrow the signs of conventional masculinity while directing them towards desires those signs were never supposed to reveal.

Fig. 16. Francis Bacon, Тwo Figures, 1953

Fig. 17. David Hockney, We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961

This is why queer representation is not simply a matter of visibility.

Visibility asks whether queer bodies can be seen.

A more difficult question is what happens to the categories around them once they are.

Scholar Paisid Aramphongphan's study Horizontal Together offers a particularly useful way of thinking about this. Examining queer embodiment around Andy Warhol, Jack Smith and dancer Fred Herko in 1960s New York, Aramphongphan pays attention not simply to identity but to movement, posture and relation. Reclining, languor, falling and horizontal bodily arrangements become ways of inhabiting space that resist expectations of uprightness, productivity and disciplined comportment (Aramphongphan, 2021).

Queerness, from this perspective, can reside in what a body does.

Or refuses to do.

It may appear in the way someone walks across a room, lets a wrist fall, occupies a bed, touches another man, exaggerates a masculine pose or declines to perform one convincingly at all.

The significance lies not in establishing a catalogue of gestures that are inherently queer.

That would simply create another template.

It lies in demonstrating how unstable the existing one already is.

A straight man can recline.

A gay man can stand like a soldier.

Neither posture possesses a sexuality.

Culture gives the gesture meaning.

Queer art can make that process visible because it allows familiar gestures to appear in unfamiliar relationships.

A muscular torso beside another male body changes the possibilities of the image. A hand resting on another man's skin can transform what appeared to be a study of physical strength into a scene of intimacy. A conventionally masculine figure can become the object of another man's desire without anything about his anatomy changing.

This is particularly important in Central and Eastern Europe, where queer visibility carries a historical relationship with absence.

The Polish artist Karol Radziszewski has spent much of his practice working precisely within that absence. Through projects including DIK Fagazine, founded in 2005, and the later Queer Archives Institute, he has collected, reconstructed and reactivated queer histories from Central and Eastern Europe that were frequently neglected by official institutions or difficult to recognise within conventional historical archives. His work asks not only where queer people were but also why their presence can become so difficult to see once history has been organised around heterosexual assumptions.

Figs. 18-20. Karol Radziszewski, stills from Kisieland, 2012

That distinction is crucial.

An archive does not need to destroy a queer body in order to erase it.

Sometimes it only needs to describe it differently. As Robert Kusek and Wojciech Szymański have argued in their examination of queer heritage in Central Europe, reconstructing queer histories is complicated not only by what has disappeared from the historical record but also by the frameworks through which surviving people, objects and cultural traces have been recognised and interpreted (Kusek and Szymański, 2022).

Two men become friends.

Intimacy becomes comradeship.

Desire becomes admiration.

A photograph becomes documentary evidence of social life while the possibility of erotic intimacy within it disappears from the historical description.

The bodies remain in the archive.

Their queerness becomes illegible.

Radziszewski's practice responds by treating the archive not as a neutral container of historical truth but as something whose categories can themselves be questioned. His Queer Archives Institute brings together photographs, publications, oral histories and other materials relating to queer life across the region, while his artistic practice frequently reinterprets forgotten or marginalised figures through contemporary queer perspectives.

This process does more than recover representation.

It changes who is allowed to inherit history.

And here the relationship between queerness and masculinity becomes particularly interesting.

One persistent feature of nationalist and conservative rhetoric has been the ability to present heterosexual masculinity as culturally authentic while treating queer identities as imported, modern or foreign. Radziszewski has spoken about encountering precisely this assumption in post-socialist contexts: homosexuality could be imagined as something arriving from the West rather than something with its own local histories.

The archive makes that claim harder to sustain.

A queer history of Central Europe does not insert homosexuality retrospectively into a previously heterosexual past.

It reveals that the past was never as heterosexual as its official image suggested.

The same principle applies to the male body.

Queer art does not arrive to corrupt a previously stable masculine image.

It reveals possibilities that the stability of that image required us not to see.

This is why desire matters so much.

The moment one man visibly desires another, masculinity becomes detached from one of the assumptions historically used to stabilise it. The body can retain every conventional sign of masculinity — muscle, facial hair, physical confidence, masculine clothing — while the direction of desire refuses the heterosexual conclusion those signs were expected to produce.

The result is not necessarily a less masculine body.

It is a body demonstrating that masculinity and heterosexuality were never synonyms.

Contemporary photographers such as Spyros Rennt push this separation further.

Rennt's images of queer communities move between nightlife and domestic space, sex and friendship, and exhibitionism and tenderness. Male bodies appear muscular, slender, dressed, naked, posed and apparently unguarded. They touch one another without the image needing to resolve whether the contact should be understood first as friendship, sexuality, performance or affection.

That ambiguity is important.

Fig. 21. Spyros Rennt, from Another Excess, 2018

Mainstream representation has often demanded that queer intimacy identify itself.

The kiss confirms the relationship.

The bed confirms sex.

The rainbow confirms identity.

Without recognisable signals, viewers may revert to heterosexual assumptions.

Queer art does not always cooperate.

Sometimes a hand is simply allowed to remain on another body.

Sometimes two men are allowed to occupy the same intimate space without explaining themselves.

Sometimes desire exists without translating itself for an imagined heterosexual viewer.

This is where the title of this section becomes more than a declaration.

The queer body does not need permission.

It does not need permission to be masculine.

It does not need permission to be feminine.

It does not need permission to desire another male body while remaining recognisably male itself.

And it does not need to demonstrate that its difference is politically useful, socially respectable or aesthetically comfortable before it deserves representation.

But perhaps most importantly, it does not need permission from the masculine ideal it helps expose.

Because once queer bodies become visible not as exceptions but as part of the history of male embodiment, something fundamental changes.

The question is no longer:

Can this body also count as masculine?

The question becomes:

Why was masculinity ever imagined narrowly enough that the body had to ask?

And at that point, queer representation stops being a footnote to the history of the male body.

It becomes one of the ways that history learns to read itself again.

A CENTRAL EUROPEAN BODY

A body does not exist outside geography.

The same shoulders, hands, muscles and gestures can acquire different meanings depending on where they are seen, when they are seen and what a culture has learned to expect from the person inhabiting them.

This is why the geography of ANDROS matters.

The exhibition could have been described simply as a survey of contemporary representations of the male body. Instead, it deliberately places that body within Central Europe, bringing together artists from the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and the Visegrád countries. Its curator, Vratislav Maňák, situates questions of masculinity alongside intimacy, identity and the particular conditions of existence within the Central European space (DOX, 2026).

But there is no single Central European man.

There never was.

Even the geographical category is unstable. The countries grouped beneath it have experienced different political systems, religious traditions, economic transformations and relationships with sexuality and gender. Czech secularism cannot simply be exchanged for Polish Catholicism. East German socialism produced different institutions from those of Hungary or Czechoslovakia. Austria followed another historical trajectory altogether.

To speak of a Central European male body, then, is not to claim that all of these histories produced the same man.

It is to ask how repeatedly changing histories have asked men to become different kinds of men.

This distinction is important because political systems are remarkably interested in bodies.

They need workers.

Soldiers.

Fathers.

Citizens.

Men capable of representing strength, productivity, sacrifice, respectability or national continuity.

The masculine body becomes useful because these abstractions can be made physical. A worker's hands can represent labour. A soldier's posture can represent discipline. An athlete's physique can stand for national vitality. A father surrounded by his family can make social continuity appear natural.

But the official image and the lived body are never quite the same thing.

Research into Central European masculinities increasingly stresses precisely this difference. Scholars working on the Central-European Masculinities project have cautioned against treating representations produced under state socialism as straightforward evidence of a single hegemonic masculinity. Propaganda may tell us which bodies institutions wanted to celebrate; it cannot, by itself, tell us how men actually inhabited gender in workplaces, homes, relationships or private life (Central-European Masculinities, 2024–2026).

The distinction creates an important gap.

Between the man a political system needs and the man who actually exists.

Fig. 22. Mirosław Bałka, The Boy and the Eagle, 1988

Inside that gap are contradictions that heroic imagery struggles to contain.

The worker can be exhausted.

The soldier can be afraid.

The father can desire another man.

The supposedly self-sufficient citizen can depend on partners, families and communities.

A body may perform the role expected of it in public while living another relationship with masculinity in private.

This is why the history of masculinity cannot be reconstructed from monuments and propaganda posters alone.

It has to enter bedrooms, workplaces, bars, family photographs, private correspondence, literature, film and archives. It has to ask not simply what masculinity looked like officially, but how it was negotiated in ordinary life.

And after 1989, the question did not become simpler.

The collapse of state socialism across much of Central and Eastern Europe brought political and economic transformations that altered many of the social positions through which masculinity had been organised. Market economies expanded, industries were restructured, multinational corporations entered the region and new ideals of individual responsibility and professional success developed alongside older expectations of male responsibility (Gregorová and Šmídová, 2026).

The worker did not simply disappear.

But another masculine figure increasingly stood beside him.

The entrepreneur.

Mobile, competitive, economically independent, self-managing.

Fig. 23. Attila Szűcs, Figure with Mock Up, 2010

His body might no longer be celebrated primarily for what it could produce collectively. It could now communicate something else: personal discipline, ambition, adaptability and the ability to succeed within the market.

Again, however, this was not one universal post-socialist experience.

The transformation produced winners and losers, different effects across generations and classes, and different trajectories across countries. Nor did older masculine expectations vanish simply because new ones arrived.

They accumulated.

A man could be expected to provide according to an older model of masculine responsibility while succeeding according to a newer model of economic individualism.

To remain emotionally controlled while becoming socially adaptable.

To preserve tradition while mastering modernity.

Masculinity did not lose its demands.

It acquired more of them.

Fig. 24. Wilhelm Sasnal, Kacper, 2024

Fig. 25. Andrej Dúbravský, Resting Farmer, 2015

This is one reason the concept of becoming, rather than simply being, is so useful here.

The interdisciplinary Central-European Masculinities research project approaches masculinity precisely as something processual and historically incomplete. Its researchers trace changing masculine forms through capitalist modernisation, the interwar period, state socialism and post-transformation societies, asking not simply what masculinity is but which versions become desirable, contested or impossible at different moments (Central-European Masculinities, 2024–2026).

Their language of incompleteness brings us unexpectedly close to the torso with which ANDROS began.

Perhaps the uncertain male body is not only a contemporary aesthetic phenomenon.

It is historical.

Each political and economic transformation leaves men inhabiting expectations inherited from one world while learning how to perform those demanded by another.

But there is another reason this history matters now.

Gender has once again become politically useful.

Across parts of Central and Eastern Europe, debates around feminism, LGBTQ+ rights and so-called “gender ideology” have become entangled with arguments about nation, family, religion and cultural sovereignty. In some political rhetoric, traditional gender roles are presented not simply as personal values but as something requiring protection from external cultural influence.

Queerness can then be positioned as foreign.

Gender diversity as imported.

The heterosexual family as authentically national.

And masculinity becomes part of the border.

Recent scholarship examining Poland, Hungary and other post-socialist contexts has shown how hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity can become intertwined with right-wing populist politics, while newer research on Polish feminist and queer art demonstrates how artists and activists have responded by making bodies and identities excluded from nationalist narratives publicly visible (Chuchracka, 2026; Kitliński and Leszkowicz, 2026).

This makes the uncertain male body politically interesting in a way that goes beyond representation.

If a political story depends upon knowing what a proper man looks like, ambiguity becomes inconvenient.

A male body that can be strong and queer disrupts the distinction.

A father who does not conform to heterosexual expectations disrupts it.

A masculine body that accepts vulnerability disrupts it.

A body whose gestures cannot reliably tell us its sexuality disrupts it.

Not because any of these bodies is inherently political.

But because systems that depend upon stable categories make uncertainty political.

Fig. 26. Alexander Tinei, Fred & Fred, 2011

Fig. 27. Jiří David, A chvěl se jak vánek z nebe II (And It Trembled Like a Breeze from Heaven II), 2019

This is where contemporary art acquires a particular role.

Art does not need to propose a new national masculinity to oppose an old one.

It can do something less spectacular and perhaps more disruptive.

It can refuse to stabilise the body.

It can leave the man reclining.

Fragmented.

Desired.

Ageing.

Alone.

Tender.

Muscular.

Queer.

Ordinary.

It can place these possibilities beside one another without deciding which deserves to become the new masculine ideal.

Fig. 28. Andrej Dúbravský, Five Friends at the Pond, 2019

Seen from this perspective, the Central European context of ANDROS is not a decorative frame around an otherwise universal exhibition.

It changes the question.

The male bodies inside the exhibition appear within a region where different political orders have repeatedly attempted to give masculinity social meaning — and where gender and sexuality continue to participate in arguments about identity, belonging and cultural change.

The uncertainty of those bodies therefore carries history with it.

Not one history.

Many overlapping ones.

Socialist and capitalist.

Religious and secular.

National and transnational.

Heterosexual and queer.

Public and private.

Each has asked something of the male body.

And none has ever completely owned it.

Perhaps this is why uncertainty matters most when certainty becomes politically useful.

When a culture insists that it knows what a man should be, the ambiguous male body does not necessarily need to argue back.

Sometimes it only needs to remain ambiguous.

THE MAN WITHOUT A TEMPLATE

What, then, should a man look like?

It is tempting to believe that somewhere within all these changing images lies a better answer.

Perhaps the heroic body was too rigid.

Perhaps masculinity should become softer.

More emotionally expressive.

More comfortable with vulnerability.

Less threatened by femininity.

More open to intimacy.

More accepting of queer desire.

There is value in all of these possibilities.

But the moment they become requirements, something familiar begins to happen.

A new template appears.

The emotionally articulate man replaces the stoic one. The sensitive father replaces the distant patriarch. The relaxed body replaces the rigid physique. Vulnerability becomes evidence of psychological maturity; tenderness becomes evidence of enlightened masculinity.

The values may have changed.

The expectation that a man should embody them correctly has not.

This is the problem with searching for a new masculinity to replace an old one.

Every ideal creates its exclusions.

If the strong man was once considered insufficiently sensitive, the sensitive man can eventually become insufficiently strong. If emotional openness becomes the mark of healthy masculinity, what happens to the man who struggles to speak? If vulnerability becomes culturally desirable, does the private man become suspect? If queerness is celebrated only when it appears liberated, expressive and visibly transgressive, what happens to queer men who are none of those things?

Even freedom can acquire a preferred appearance.

Perhaps the more difficult possibility is to stop asking the male body to solve masculinity for us.

Throughout this history, the body has been required to provide evidence.

Muscle could prove strength.

Posture could prove discipline.

Work could prove usefulness.

Heterosexual desire could prove normality.

Emotional restraint could prove self-control.

More recently, vulnerability can prove self-awareness and openness can prove progress.

Again and again, the man is asked to demonstrate that he belongs to the category.

Contemporary art can interrupt this demand precisely because it does not have to produce a replacement.

The bodies gathered within ANDROS do not resolve themselves into a coherent new masculine ideal. They differ in age, posture, sexuality, intimacy, physicality and emotional register. Some appear powerful. Others withdrew. Some bodies invite desire; others resist easy access. Some seem deliberately constructed as images, while others appear almost caught in moments when performance has temporarily fallen away.

Their disagreement is part of their significance.

There is no final body waiting at the end of the exhibition to tell us what masculinity has become.

And perhaps there should not be.

This is where the language of a crisis of masculinity becomes inadequate.

The phrase appears whenever familiar masculine roles seem to lose authority: when economic structures change, when women's social positions change, when sexuality becomes less rigidly regulated, when fathers and partners are expected to behave differently, when the old markers of male status no longer guarantee recognition.

The language of crisis makes intuitive sense.

But it also carries an assumption.

For masculinity to be in crisis, there must be some stable condition from which it has fallen.

Some previous coherence.

Some version of manhood that once worked (Hearn, 2022).

The history we have been tracing makes that difficult to sustain.

Masculinity has repeatedly changed alongside the societies that produced it. The worker, soldier, gentleman, father, athlete, breadwinner and entrepreneur did not express one timeless masculine essence. They were ways of organising expectations around men under particular historical conditions.

Even the bodies that appeared most certain required constant reinforcement.

They had to be painted.

Sculpted.

Photographed.

Advertised.

Celebrated.

Repeated.

If masculinity had truly been self-evident, culture would not have needed to work so hard to make it visible.

What appears today as uncertainty may therefore be something other than collapse.

It may be visibility.

We can see the construction more clearly.

We can see that muscle does not inevitably lead to dominance.

That vulnerability does not cancel strength.

That desire does not determine how masculine a body must appear.

That being looked at does not make a man less of a subject.

That receiving care does not make him less autonomous.

That queerness does not sit outside masculinity waiting to be admitted.

And once those connections stop appearing inevitable, the body gains room to contradict itself.

A man can want strength without treating weakness as failure.

He can enjoy conventional masculinity without believing it is universal.

He can be uncomfortable with vulnerability without becoming morally deficient.

He can desire men without needing his body to signify queerness to everyone who sees him.

He can be feminine without that femininity requiring explanation.

He can be ordinary.

That last possibility may be more radical than it sounds.

Because masculinity has so often been organised around performance — around proving, achieving, providing, controlling, enduring — simply allowing a male body to exist without asking what it demonstrates can feel strangely unfamiliar.

Not heroic.

Not transgressive.

Not exemplary.

Just human.

This does not mean that categories disappear.

Masculinity remains socially meaningful. Gender continues to shape how bodies are treated, desired, rewarded, feared and understood. Political systems still make use of gendered ideals. Art does not exist outside those structures simply because an artist refuses to reproduce them.

Nor is uncertainty equally comfortable for everyone.

The ability to disregard a masculine norm can itself depend on class, race, sexuality, age, geography and physical safety. For some men, failing to perform the expected form of masculinity carries consequences far beyond aesthetic judgement.

There is therefore no reason to romanticise uncertainty.

But neither must it automatically be diagnosed as a crisis.

Uncertainty can also mean that the distance between the body and the expectation placed upon it has become visible.

And within that distance, something opens.

Not a new definition of masculinity.

Space.

Space for strength that does not require dominance.

For vulnerability that does not need to prove courage.

For desire that does not need to explain the body experiencing it.

For intimacy without embarrassment.

For solitude without failure.

For masculinity without heterosexuality.

For maleness without masculinity.

And for men who recognise themselves in several of these possibilities at once.

Perhaps this is why the torso is such an appropriate figure for the contemporary male body after all.

At the beginning, it appeared incomplete.

A fragment from which something seemed to be missing.

But incompleteness looks different when we stop assuming that there was ever one correct body waiting to be reconstructed.

The missing pieces no longer have to be restored.

The body does not need to become whole according to somebody else's design.

It can remain unresolved.

This may be the most significant difference between the uncertain male body and the masculine ideals that preceded it.

The old ideal asked the body to provide an answer.

Contemporary art increasingly allows it to become the question.

And perhaps the uncertain male body is not a body that has lost its meaning.

It is a body released from the obligation to mean only one thing.

REFERENCES

Aramphongphan, P. (2021) Horizontal Together: Art, Dance, and Queer Embodiment in 1960s New York. Manchester: Manchester University Press. doi: 10.7765/9781526148445.

Begiato, J. (2020) Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. doi: 10.7765/9781526128584.

Brajato, N. and Dhoest, A. (2022) ‘Ambiguous gaze: masculinity and the male body in Dirk Bikkembergs’ fashion and photographic production’, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 18(1), pp. 21–46. doi: 10.1080/18902138.2022.2091919.

Central-European Masculinities (2024–2026) Central-European Masculinities in a Comparative Perspective. CEFRES and partner institutions.

Chuchracka, M. (2026) ‘Contested queer value: hegemonic masculinity, exclusionary regimes and extractive inclusion in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe’, Journal of Gender Studies. Published online 10 March. doi: 10.1080/09589236.2026.2642905.

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art (2026) ANDROS: The Male Body in Contemporary Central European Art. Prague: DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, 4 September 2026–24 January 2027.

Gregorová, K. and Šmídová, I. (2026) ‘Embodied power in the lives of ageing managers: masculinities, health and privilege in a post-Socialist context’, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 21(3), pp. 238–253. doi: 10.1080/18902138.2026.2614159.

Hearn, J. (2022) ‘The place and potential of crisis/crises in critical studies on men and masculinities’, Global Discourse, 12(3–4), pp. 563–585. doi: 10.1332/204378921X16334429502843.

Kitliński, T. and Leszkowicz, P. (2026) ‘Feminist and Queer Action and Art in Poland’s Illiberal Democracy’, in Altay, T., Al-Ali, N. and Galor, K. (eds.) Resisting Far-Right Politics in the Middle East and Europe: Queer Feminist Critiques. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 211–239.

Kusek, R. and Szymański, W. (2022) ‘Queer heritage in Central Europe: desperately seeking a queer’, Ikonotheka, 32, pp. 27–34. doi: 10.31338/2657-6015ik.32.2.

Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16(3), pp. 6–18. doi: 10.1093/screen/16.3.6.

Queer Archives Institute (2015–present) Queer Archives Institute. Founded by Karol Radziszewski, Warsaw.

Rennt, S. (2022) ‘Queer intimacy and community: Q&A with Spyros Rennt’, interview by C. Boševski, Archer Magazine.

IMAGE NOTES

Fig. 1. Robert Mapplethorpe, Bob Love, 1979.
Gelatin silver print, 35.6 × 35.6 cm. Collection: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Committee on Photography Fund. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. The Museum of Modern Art

Fig. 2. Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Every Moment Counts (Ecstatic Antibodies), 1989.
Colour photograph. Courtesy of Autograph, London. © Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Autograph identifies the work under this exact title and date and credits images to its collection. Autograph

Fig. 3. Laura Stevens, from the him series, 2011–2012.
Photograph from the series him. © Laura Stevens. The series photographed more than fifty men in the artist's home over the course of a year, exploring the male nude as the object of a female gaze. Laura Stevens

Fig. 4. John Coplans, Self-Portrait (Frieze No. 2, Four Panels), 1994.
Twelve black-and-white photographs on paper, arranged as four panels. © The John Coplans Trust. Collection/source: Tate, London. The Guardian

Fig. 5. Apollonios, Belvedere Torso, c. 1st century BCE.
Marble. Signed by Apollonios, son of Nestor, Athenian. Vatican Museums, Museo Pio Clementino, Hall of the Muses. The Vatican dates the sculpture to the 1st century BCE and notes that it was probably inspired by a Greek bronze of the first half of the 2nd century BCE. Vatican Museums

ANDROS

For Figs. 6–9, source/reproduction context: ANDROS: The Male Body in Contemporary Central European Art, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 2026. DOX's official press archive provides downloadable press photographs and identifies these four works individually. DOX

Fig. 6. Thomas Riess, Idol, 2017.
Reproduced in connection with ANDROS, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague. © Thomas Riess.

Fig. 7. Michal Czinege, Head 7, 2013.
Reproduced in connection with ANDROS, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague. © Michal Czinege.

Fig. 8. Ivan Pinkava, Loner (Samotář), 2015.
Reproduced in connection with ANDROS, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague. © Ivan Pinkava.

Fig. 9. Ruprecht von Kaufmann, Couple on the Sofa (Dvojice na pohovce), 2019.
Reproduced in connection with ANDROS, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague. © Ruprecht von Kaufmann.

Fig. 10. Filippino Lippi, Pietà (The Dead Christ Mourned by Nicodemus and Two Angels), c. 1500.
Oil and possibly tempera on panel, painted surface 17.5 × 33.3 cm. Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Open Access; public domain. National Gallery of Art

Fig. 11. Thomas Eakins, [Reclining Male Nude], 1887–92.
Platinum print. David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1943, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, object 43.87.19. The sitter is identified by the Met as amateur athlete Bill Duckett. Public-domain/Open Access collection image. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fig. 12. Jack Smith, film still from Flaming Creatures, 1962–63.
16mm film, black-and-white, sound, 43 min. © Jack Smith Archive. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Whitney Museum of American Art

Fig. 13. Lucian Freud, Naked Man with Rat, 1977–78.
Oil on canvas. Collection: Art Gallery of Western Australia. © The Lucian Freud Archive / relevant rights holder. The title, date, medium and collection are independently documented. PagePlace

Fig. 14. Ron Mueck, Dead Dad, 1996–97.
Mixed-media sculpture. © Ron Mueck. The work is a deliberately reduced-scale representation of the artist's father's body; National Galleries of Scotland describes it as approximately half life-size. National Galleries of Scotland

Fig. 15. Louis Fratino, Four Poster Bed, 2021.
Oil on canvas, 249.4 × 137.3 cm. Collezione De Iorio, Verona. © Louis Fratino. Photograph/reproduction credit: Aurélien Mole where using the published image associated with that credit. Vogue Italia

Fig. 16. Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953.
Oil on canvas, 152.5 × 116.5 cm. Private collection. Catalogue Raisonné no. 53-24. © The Estate of Francis Bacon / DACS, London. The Francis Bacon Estate confirms the exact title, date, medium and dimensions. Francis Bacon

Fig. 17. David Hockney, We Two Boys Together Clinging, 1961.
© David Hockney. The David Hockney Foundation confirms the title and 1961 date. The David Hockney Foundation

Figs. 18–20. Karol Radziszewski, stills from Kisieland, 2012.
Film/video project drawing on Radziszewski's encounter with Ryszard Kisiel and Kisiel's queer archive. © Karol Radziszewski.

Fig. 21. Spyros Rennt, from Another Excess, 2018.
Photograph from the series/photobook Another Excess. © Spyros Rennt. Reproduction/source: Dazed. Dazed identifies the work as from Rennt's Another Excess and credits the photography to Spyros Rennt. Dazed Digital

A CENTRAL EUROPEAN BODY

Fig. 22. Mirosław Bałka, The Boy and the Eagle, 1988.
Mixed-media sculpture/installation: synthetic material, zinc sheet, artificial stone, water and water pump; overall dimensions 160 × 256.3 × 91.5 cm. © Mirosław Bałka. MutualArt

Fig. 23. Attila Szűcs, Figure with Mock Up, 2010.
Painting. © Attila Szűcs.

Fig. 24. Wilhelm Sasnal, Kacper, 2024.
Oil on canvas, 140 × 199.8 × 2.8 cm. © Wilhelm Sasnal. Photograph: Katie Morrison. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Ocula

Fig. 25. Andrej Dúbravský, Resting Farmer, 2015.
Acrylic and “stopmach” on canvas, 180 × 120 cm. © Andrej Dúbravský. Source: artist's official archive. Andrej Dúbravský

Fig. 26. Alexander Tinei, Fred & Fred, 2011.
Painting. © Alexander Tinei.

Fig. 27. Jiří David, A chvěl se jak vánek z nebe II (And It Trembled Like a Breeze from Heaven II), 2019

Fig. 28. Andrej Dúbravský, Five Friends at the Pond, 2019.
© Andrej Dúbravský.

Anatomy

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