Jimmy DeSana & Sevina Tzanou: Condo 2025 hosting Kendall Koppe

18 January - 22 February 2025 Gallery

Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.

– Kathy Acker

 

Seduction is often a spilling over in excess, something that happens after a few too many drinks or when night falls and an artificial light shows up rouged lips and powdered cheeks in a glitter. A surrealist mishmash of limbs and skin. A lit cigarette between lips, face in a cloud of vapour.

 

The logic of striptease is that arousal is about what is concealed as much as what is revealed. In one of DeSana’s images the playful mismatch of a polished stilletto and high-socked business leather boot make these two adornments more charged with a queer erotic than the nude waist and thighs that border the photo. DeSana takes the normative points of desire and moves them. 

 

Often his nudes are plugged into everyday domestic objects: chairs, coathangers, ladders. Drained of the on/off gratifications that make up the simply pornographic, DeSana queers his objects in a way that makes the normative strange and the erotic and titillating strangely mundane.

 

Desire on the move. Tzanou’s painterly marks – whether fluid twists or short violent stabs – come in glimpses and gestures. A face doubled in the mirror, or sinking Ophelia-like into bathtub water. On her canvases – and in her practice as burlesque performer – Tzanou plays with images of the femme as a material: to be exaggerated or abstracted, turned from glamour to grotesquery and back again.

 

 

Jimmy DeSana (1949-1990) has left an indelible mark on the history of photography. A fixture of the oft-mythologised downtown New York scene of the 70s and 80s, DeSana’s practice stretches from portraits of contemporaries – Laurie Anderson, Blondie, Talking Heads etc. – to the surreal, colour-saturated, queer and avant-garde images that characterise his singular aesthetic. Recent solo / duo exhibitions include Ruins of Rooms, with Paul.P, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2024), Jimmy DeSana: Submission, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2023), The Sodomite Invasion: Experimentation, Politics and Sexuality in the work of Jimmy DeSana and Marlon T. Riggs, Griffin Art Projects, Vancouver (2020).

 

Sevina Tzanou (b.1994, Greece) lives and works in Bonn, Germany and Athens, Greece. Tzanou studied in Düsseldorf under Katharina Grosse, Eberhard Havekost, and Yesim Akdeniz. Her most recent solo and group exhibitions include: The great Disastress, Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2023), Final Fantasy, Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, Tallinn (2023), Spikes that bite, Margot Samel, New York (2023), Parties I am not Invited to, Robert Grunenberg, Berlin (2022). She has performed at Kunstmuseum Bonn, and Kai Art Center, Tallinn (both 2023).