White Columns in New York City is presenting a selection from Vince Aletti's collection of photographs, drawings, paintings and ephemera titled "Male," which opens Friday, February 22. For more information visit http://www.whitecolumns.org
The photograph below, Seated Nude, from 2003, was initially a study the artist did based on art-history for his senior thesis exhibition at NYU, titled "200 Years of Revolution (and nothing has changed)." He was interested in exploring what Camille Paglia called the dress of "symbolic significance" in the history of the male body in art. Seated Nude was the final work in the project that focused more on the flow between neo-classical clothing, the nude, and contemporary fashion but this photograph shifts to the anonymity of the artist model contrasted with the directness of his gaze, and the slight clue to his person in the faint paint smears on the model's hand.
