Here is the definition of erotic, according to 93-year-old artist Martha Edelheit. “It’s sensual, nonviolent, consensual, warm, inviting, sometimes funny, witty, amusing. Erotica assumes shared association, touching, stroking, licking, looking, playing, exposing. It digresses, teases, laughs, arouses, without harming.”
This is all further laid out, to vivid effect, in “Erotic City,” a group exhibition of more than 40 artists from the 1950s to the present, including Joan Semmel, Carolee Schneemann, Paul Cadmus, and Tom of Finland, on view now through April 26 at Eric Firestone Gallery at 40 Great Jones Street.
The show is curated by Edelheit, the pioneering feminist artist whose 1960s works address female desire, the body, and skin as a canvas for tattoo imagery. (A handful are on view in the show.) Imaginative, playful, transgressive, and highly erotic at a time when that wasn’t acceptable for women artists (“radical eroticism,” as art historian Rachel Middleman later called it), her oeuvre tacitly challenges social expectations of women and traditional ideas of figurative painting and the nude.
Martha Edelheit, The Dinner Table is Set for Dessert, 2015
Martha Edelheit in her studio
