Screenprint Eddy Varekamp Two Men Bacchanal Black 25/57

Screenprint in black on cream paper by the Amsterdam artist Eddy Varekamp (born 1949), signed in pencil and numbered 25/57, monogrammed EV lower left within the image. The sheet shows two male nudes in a garden setting with grape vines, lush plant growth and a table set with wine glasses, a bottle and a bowl of fruit. The standing figure wears a crown of grapes and leaves, a classical bacchanal attribute. 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 repeatedly places male companionship within a mythological or arcadian frame, with explicit references to the classical and Mediterranean tradition. This composition borrows from the bacchanal: the grape crown, the wine, the fruit and the garden scene set the two figures as Dionysus and companion, or as two Bacchants in the rapture of the feast. The bacchanal as a figuration of homoerotic desire has a long history in Western art, from Roman drinking vessels through Caravaggio's Bacchus to twentieth-century reinterpretations in Duncan Grant and David Hockney. Varekamp adds a contemporary, paper-cut formal clarity to that tradition.