Maurice Vellekoop
Cockadoodle
2015
TTT, Manchester | first UK solo exhibition
Space Station Sixty Five, London
Curator | exhibition
Supported by Arts Council England and Space Station Sixty-Five (SS65), with special thanks to Rachael House and Jo David.
Cockadoodle: The Erogenous Art of Maurice Vellekoop uncorked the Canadian artist’s contribution to illustration, underground comics and contemporary erotica. Presented at TTT Gallery, Manchester and Space Station Sixty Five, London, it was the artist’s first European solo exhibition.
Maurice Vellekoop draws from a vast and familiar pool of televisual and filmic tropes to reflect wider truths and archetypes; their literary, historical and psycho-sexual origins redundant when these same bold outlines – such as in a child’s colouring book – are mirrored in the shadows of friends, family, lovers, idols and our own mutable reflections.
Ripe for celebration, Vellekoop is a leading figure within a history of artist illustrators who trace their lineage to the golden age of powder-tinted girlie artists, from Alberto Vargas to Zoë Mozert and Gil Elvgren, to the leather-clad muscles of later male fantasy art, encompassing Tom of Finland, Harry Bush and Frank Frazetta.
Featuring the fullest presentation to date of the Pin-Ups series, the artist’s successful book of explicit male ‘beefcake’ illustrations. The gay male equivalent of cheesecake beauties and inspired by vintage girlie art, the chocolate box selection ranges from musical idols, sporting heroes and figures from fantasy, history and literature. Two new additions upon the occasion of the exhibition added North of England archetypes – So Much To Answer For (craft beer brewer) and Glow Stick (acid house raver).
ABC Book, An Adult Primer, re-imagines a traditional children's alphabet primer for adults, complete with rhyming couplets, from a guileless, x-rated perspective, while the exhibition premiere of the comic strip Transworld features a North Korean, transgender air stewardess in a zipper-bursting encounter with a hunky Iranian male passenger: an alternative spin on the temptations posed by the so-called axis of evil.
The World of Gloria Badcock follows the sexploits of glamorous, bisexual magazine editrix Gloria Badcock and her gay companion Dr. Cornelius as they travel back in time to the eve of the French Revolution, cavorting with courtesans and servants alike at the court of Marie Antoinette.
With such colourful characters as Dame Formalda Hyde and Vatda Heck, A Nut at the Opera is a droll satire of a fictitious operatic cornucopia, with references swinging between the heights of Wagnerian solemnity and the excesses of French spectacle.
Editorial commissions range from the Hieronymus Bosch inspired The World of Lustly Delights, cover art for No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics and English Eccentrics for Abercrombie and Fitch, featuring a Mad Hatter’s tea party attended by the likes of Quentin Crisp, Dusty Springfield, Alan Turing, Leigh Bowery, Boy George and Edith Sitwell.
The exhibition was supported by a programme of events and activities that addressed notions of private shame, empowerment, sex-positivism and the often overlooked role of personal fantasy in critical cultural appreciation.
Public events included the first Manchester outing for the nude literary salon, Naked Boys Reading, a presentation by the artist on his practice with Got Lead: Drawing Sex, Arousal and Desire, and the Erotic Film Society presents an evening with Amory Peart, the queer adult film director specialising in transgressive adult parodies of mainstream features, from The Bionic MILF to The Iron Lady Garden for Television X.
A new two page colour comic, introduced by Paul Gravett, featured in ArtReview for their March 2015 issue, with an extended interview online. Maurice Vellekoop is currently undertaking a graphic memoir, I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together!, commissioned by the Canadian Council for the Arts and edited by author Chipp Kidd, to be published by Pantheon Books.
Instagram @mauricevellekoop
