Portraits of Historical and Contemporary Queer Icons

UE: Could you please tell us about the “Gallery of Portraits” on the wall in the classroom?

KR: I was studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, so that’s my primary medium, but I kind of quit. I didn’t know what to do, why to paint in contemporary times.

And only when I started to search archives and hearing a lot about the stories, I find out that many figures from the past, queer figures that are not that important, were never presented in the form of the portrait.

So I kind of got back to painting because of those historical stories, and to represent the queer figures from the past.

And the Gallery of Portraits is a big series that is also a fruit of the collaboration with some academics, friends, artists, who were telling me who was kind of important in the past from queer history in their own countries. And based on that, I selected a quite representative group of people that I decided to paint in my style and put them together.

And they are usually presented as real paintings, or like in Moderna Museet in the form of posters, reproductions with the dates and names of the people, and hang very high-level like in the typical classroom. So, you could see that they are patrons of the space.