Linocut Eddy Varekamp Two Men Mediterranean Café 5/31

Four-colour linocut by the Amsterdam artist Eddy Varekamp (born 1949), signed in pencil lower left, marked 1e st. (first state) and numbered 5/31. The sheet shows a Mediterranean café scene with two men at a terrace table and, below, a man reading the newspaper among foraging chickens, executed in deep red, midnight blue and ochre yellow on cream paper with a natural deckle edge. 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. As an openly queer artist he has made male companionship a continuous motif in his oeuvre: from bathing and beach scenes to intimate moments of men together at table. This composition takes place on a Southern European café terrace identified by the rooster, the wine glasses and the diamond paving pattern as Greek or French Mediterranean. The touch between the two men at the upper table, the shared meal and the domestic ease of the scene place the work within a tradition of queer Mediterranean imagery in which the southern holiday stands for a freer male intimacy, a theme that also recurs in the work of David Hockney and Duncan Grant.