Twenty-three artists reflect on 2021
To take stock of the past year, Artforum asked an international group of artists to select a single exhibition or event that most memorably caught their attention in 2021.
Original article can be found at artforum.com
PAUL SOILEAU/CHRISTEENE
Sal Salandra (Club Rhubarb, New York)
What happens when the sexually oppressive, sadomasochistic ways of the Catholic Church are foisted upon a young gay man who ends up translating his carnal fantasies into needlepoint? You get the dreamlike, delicately perverse “thread-art paintings” of Sal Salandra, whose captivating, embroidered tableaux were featured in a solo exhibition at New York’s Club Rhubarb earlier this year. Taking in the seventy-five-year-old artist’s work—which felt like a trip through Bluebeard’s castle, but only if the homicidal husband were a dark leather daddy into cock-and-ball torture—brought me back to my own frustrated Catholic childhood and generated within me a fountain of pure joy and so much pride for all my incredible queer kin.
