AIDS and Art:

Queer Art and the Immaterial Griefs of the AIDS Crisis

In exhibitions in Tuscany and London, we are asked to reckon with the realities of absence and what we can do with the empty spaces left behind.

By Sam Moore • 03/21/25 8:00am

‘ “Eyes Open in the Dark,” another Hujar retrospective at Raven Row in London, shows Hujar’s work alongside images of the artist made by his contemporaries, including an almost cubist grid portrait by Paul Thek and images of Hujar on his deathbed taken by Wojnarowicz. Through this artistic communion, Hujar and those in his inner circle are able to provide us with a kind of lineage, a way to place ourselves within a timeline of queer art and artists ruptured by the AIDS crisis. In contrast to this, Hamad Butt, the subject of “Apprehensions,” a retrospective at IMMA in Dublin, moves away from solid and recognizable images of the past. Butt’s work was more explicitly informed by the AIDS crisis and his own diagnosis in 1987; in a video where the artist is interviewed by his younger brother Jamal, Hamad reveals that he was “unable to express what [he] really wanted to say because of the limitations of painting.” While Butt’s work is no less of a document of a time and community ravaged by the AIDS crisis, his work offers a much less material world for us to grieve, instead trying to capture a precarious landscape through more abstract forms or those that foreground Butt’s own proximity to death.’

^{When Hamad is being interviewed by his brother, he lies on the sofa as if he were posing for a Hujar portrait. Courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Photo: Ros Kavanagh}

“What might bring these artists together isn’t just the way in which, in vastly different visual languages, they show a world that came undone under the shadow of death and plague, but instead, questions of memory: how is it we can remember what’s been lost? Whether intentionally or not, there’s a moment in “Apprehensions” that echoes Hujar’s practice. When Hamad is being interviewed by his brother, he lies on the sofa as if he were posing for a Hujar portrait, offering up a part of himself to us as if it were the easiest thing in the world. Butt’s work understands how fragile and precarious things are, showing them in real-time through ambitious, unsettling installations. It’s these moments, where whatever space there might be between life and death feels so thin that we might be able to glimpse through it if we try hard enough, that Hujar seems to freeze in time. So much of his work is dedicated to the moments of life that are lived in between. This can be seen in his images of performers—Hujar’s images from Italy capture the transience and transformation of live performance like little else—and landscapes; in one of the final rooms of the Raven Row is a series of Hujar’s photos of the Hudson River, the portraits and faces that we so often associate with his work are gone, and we are asked to reckon with the realities of absence and what we can do with the empty spaces left behind.”

1 April, 2025

FRIEZE OPINION:

The Singular Vision of Peter Hujar

| BY ALASTAIR CURTIS | 24 FEB 25

Artist, Photographer and Printer Gary Schneider reflects on his relationship with Hujar

^{Gary Schneider, John Erdman, 2024. Courtesy: Gary Schneider}

“Artist and master printer Gary Schneider was a close friend and occasional subject of Peter Hujar, the New York-based photographer famed for his empathetic photographs of artist and writer friends, drag performers, nude lovers, farm animals and cityscapes. Since Hujar’s death in 1987, Schneider has been entrusted with making prints of his late friend’s work, a process he describes in engrossing detail in his recent book Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom (2024). More than three decades spent poring over Hujar’s photographs has given Schneider an unrivalled insight into how their austere elegance was achieved. Here, he remembers what it was like to work with Hujar, the ‘eccentricities’ of his prints and how their years of friendship and collaboration inspired his co-curation, with John Douglas Millar, of ‘Eyes Open in the Dark’ at Raven Row in London – the first comprehensive UK survey of Hujar’s photographs to date. – Alastair Curtis”

Excerpt from the interview with Gary Schneider:

“GS : I was young, and I was in awe of him. I thought he was a truly brilliant artist. In the studio session, you can see that, at first, I was trying to make ‘Peter Hujar’ images for him. He didn’t direct. He just waited. He allowed you to come to him. It was your job, as the performer, to trust him fully – to trust that he knew what he was doing and to allow it to happen, rather than to try to make it happen….”

27 February, 2025