Stencil Print Eddy Varekamp Two Men in Garden Yellow Orange

Four-colour stencil print on heavy watercolour paper by the Amsterdam artist Eddy Varekamp (born 1949), signed in pencil lower left and monogrammed EV lower right within the image. The sheet shows two explicit male nudes in a garden or arcadian setting with a rooster, a wine glass, an open book and lush plant growth, executed in yellow, orange, deep red and black on cream paper with a natural deckle edge. The work 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, often set within a Mediterranean arcadia where nature, animal and man occupy equal ground. This composition takes place in a sun-drenched garden where two men, surrounded by foraging roosters and flowering plants, drink and read together in full nudity. The warm yellow ground and the construction through four stencil passes with hand-applied pigments place the sheet within a tradition of Southern homoerotic imagery reaching back to the Mediterranean works of Matisse and to the Provençal and Aegean scenes of David Hockney and Duncan Grant.