Artists

Paul P.

Press release

Maureen Paley is pleased to present The Fugitive Marvels of Sunset, the fifth solo exhibition of Paul P. at the gallery. 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 character. In these portraits, the figure is available and unavailable, present and absent. The titles and dedications on the backs of the paintings suggest this figure is someone specific, a crush or a lost friend." Paul P. (b. 1977, Peterborough, Canada) lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Recent solo exhibitions include: Pleasure in the Knife-edged Moment, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada (2022); Bacchante with lowered eyes, Queer Thoughts, New York, NY, USA (2021). Selected group exhibitions include: Devotion, Trautwein Herleth, Berlin, Germany (2025); Houseguest: Shadows Fall Down, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2021); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2014). 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.