Linocut Eddy Varekamp Four Male Nudes Blue and Black

Linocut in black and blue by the Amsterdam artist Eddy Varekamp (born 1949), signed in pencil below the image. The sheet shows four male nudes in a fragmented interior, built up from intersecting planes that suggest a cubist reading. The print is in good condition.

Varekamp works from his studio and gallery on Hartenstraat in the Negen Straatjes district of Amsterdam, where since the nineteen-eighties he has produced prints, watercolours and ceramics. Male nudes and group compositions form a continuous thread in his oeuvre, often set in bath, changing-room and dormitory scenes drawing on a long iconographic tradition of the male bath: from Roman thermae through the nineteenth-century academic bathhouse scene to twentieth-century homoerotic imagery. Here the composition lets the figures merge through shared silhouette edges and the blue shadow line, a device that makes the scene at once intimate and collective. The flat black ground and the clear colour separation are characteristic of Varekamp's linocut work, part of the same series as his better-known Bathers and All Sailors Ashore.