re:Defining beauty

About

Focused on the male body, this exhibition allows visitors to experience a contemporary take on the historical portrayal of the male nude.  This exhibition invites the viewer to explore and celebrate the male nude from the point of view of Nude for Thought's  fourteen artists. Nude for Thought are a London-based group of men who paint men, creating art from life with the male as a muse in the great tradition. Inspired by the British Museum exhibition Defining Beauty which examined the invention of the modern idea of the human body in art, the works presented have been created in a variety of traditional and non-traditional media to consider the male nude as "an object of beauty and bearer of meaning". There will be a performance at Leyden Gallery by Roy Joseph Butler on Saturday 7 November from 11 - 12.30pm & 3-4.30pm.

Nude for Thought's re: Defining beauty comes at a time when there is a rising international interest in the male nude, particularly following three large shows at major European Museums. In 2012, the Leopold Museum, Vienna, presented Naked Men, the first major exhibition focused exclusively in the male nude. In the words of of curator Tobias G. Natter, the exhibition highlighted “ that categories which had previously seemed established, such as ‘masculinity’, ‘body’ and ‘nakedness’, have today become unstable.”. This exhibition was followed in 2013 by Nude Men at The Ludwig Museum, Budapest and Masculine/Masculine at the Museum D’Orsay, Paris.