PAUL P.

For over 25 years, the foundation of the artist’s practice has been a series of portraits of anonymous young men, their images appropriated from gay erotic magazines produced between the late 1960s and the early 1980s; a period bracketed by the beginning of gay liberation and the onset of the AIDS crisis. The head-and-shoulders format he favours constricts the libidinal pull of the source material, directing attention instead toward the models’ expressions of youthful reticence and self-knowledge.

P. has written, “beyond the gay images from the 1970s, I look further back to Whistler, Sargent, Montesquiou, and Proust to locate the atmosphere in which to portray this physicality.” These defiant dandies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries sought to represent queerness under repressive law, deploying inflection, allegory, and inference as formal strategies (and forms of resistance), and it is these coded visual languages that he draws upon.

Alongside portraits, there are works including bats emerging from dense clouds, laundry strung against a hazy sky, and a wave slipping into shore at night: subjects in which fading light renders beauty both transient and luminous.

These paintings are organised around moments of threshold: twilight scenes in which deep shadows and silvery light coexist.

The artist’s methodology considers desire, refinement and beauty, yet these considerations are edged with unease. The men depicted existed within a narrow period of freedom, and their individual fates remain unknown. In bringing together the coded visual languages of the Victorian era and the archive of post-Stonewall erotic culture, P. reminds us that certain freedoms remain cyclical, not assured.

Paul P., a monograph of the artist’s work was recently published by Maureen Paley in collaboration with Gregory R. Miller & Company and Greene Naftali, and is available to purchase at the gallery.

Solo museum exhibitions of have been presented at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, with Amor et Mors (2023), and at the Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen with Early Skirmishes (2022). In 2024, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, presented the two-person exhibition Ruins of Rooms: Jimmy DeSana and Paul P., which featured two watercolours now included in The Fugitive Marvels of Sunset.

Selected recent solo exhibitions include: Snapping Off, Judy’s Death at Sans Titre Gallery, Paris, France (2026); Ambiguous Mouths, Massimo Minini, Brescia, Italy (2025); Sibilant Esses, Greene Naftali, New York, USA (2024); Vespertilians, Maureen Paley: Studio M, London, UK (2022); Friendly in the Knife-edged Moment, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada (2022); Bacchante with lowered eyes, Queer Thoughts, New York, NY, USA (2021); and Centaurs on the Beach, Morena di Luna, Hove, UK (2020).

Selected group exhibitions include: Devotion, Trautwein Herleth, Berlin, Germany (2025); outer view, inner world, Maureen Paley: Morena di Luna, Hove, UK (2023); Houseguest: Shadows Fall Down, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2021); Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA (2018); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2014); Male, Maureen Paley, London, UK (2010); and Compass in Hand, MoMA, New York, USA (2009).

His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, among others.