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In fact, such an exhibition has been over three decades in the making, first discussed at a time when the artist was still alive and transforming the Echo Park home into the community space it is today. Tom’s the head of the family, the grandaddy, and now the whole extended family gets to come to the Biennale and be here with him.’ ‘It’s typical that he would lead the pack here. The exhibition also marks the first time that some works from the Tom of Finland Foundation’s diverse permanent collection have been presented to the public outside of Tom House, though Dehner notes that it’s not the first time Tom’s own work has appeared in Venice during the Biennale in 2009, Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset included a number of his illustrations in their Nordic Pavilion. Numbering around 80 works across mediums – painting, illustration, sculpture, photography, film and printed ephemera – ‘AllTogether’ coincides with the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, which returns this year after a three-year hiatus post-pandemic. ‘We hope that people here get that same feeling of home.’ ‘The challenge of creating the exhibition was to have the impact and effect of coming to Tom House,’ says Dehner. Spanning the 1940s to the present day, the exhibition explores Tom’s unique and pervasive legacy, interspersing his own illustrations with the varying works of artists who have come in his wake. Recreation of Tom House’s living room at ‘AllTogether’ by Tom of Finland Foundation and The Communityĭrawing on the foundation’s history of both preserving the work of queer artists – many of whom faced discrimination and legal consequences in their time for their creations – and promoting a new generation of erotic art, ‘AllTogether’ attempts to capture the unique spirit of those who have passed through Tom House in the past three decades, alongside the pioneers who came before them.
Around Dehner, objects capture the home’s heady mix of the erotic and domestic: a nude photograph of a man in the reflection of a bathroom mirror, a plastic phallus, mugs, figurines, a roll-along drinks trolley with a single bottle of Tom of Finland-branded vodka on top. This past weekend, thousands of miles away in the backstreets of Venice’s northern Cannaregio district, a characteristically leather-clad Dehner – who remains president of the Tom of Finland Foundation – found himself back in Tom House’s living room, albeit a recreation created for the foundation’s new group exhibition ‘AllTogether’ at Studio Cannaregio (23 April – 26 June 2022), supported by Italian fashion label Diesel and curated in association with Paris’ The Community gallery. As such, Tom House’s 14 rooms claim more than 3,500 works of erotic art and over 100,000 pieces of ephemera, memorabilia and objects from both Tom himself and those who have called the property home over the years – a fittingly expansive collection for the artist’s own outsized legacy.
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The Echo Park home – now owned by the Tom of Finland Foundation, which the artist founded with friend, lover, and business partner Durk Dehner in 1984 – is known as ‘Tom House’ and has become an elysium for queer and erotic artists from around the world, who make a pilgrimage to the Los Angeles address to hone their craft in a series of residencies. In the decade before his death, Finland-born Touko Laaksonen (1920 – 1991) – best known by the artistic pseudonym Tom of Finland – lived in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighbourhood, where he spent the final years of his life adding to his prolific catalogue of sexually liberated, libidinally charged illustrations of beefed-up men, which first appeared in Bob Mizer’s homoerotic magazine Physique Pictorial in the 1950s.