Beyond the Manosphere

What does it mean to be a man today? This question has become urgent with the rise of the ‘manosphere,’ a loose online network in which a tough, misogynistic form of masculinity prevails. For many, this feels threatening, and with Trumpism it has increasingly become more mainstream. In the exhibition Beyond the Manosphere – Masculinities Today, contemporary artists present masculinity as an expression of power – but also as a lived reality that can be ordinary, precarious, and tender. They approach masculinity as a broad and layered phenomenon, beyond dominant clichés.

The exhibition brings together 37 artists, with works from the 1960s to the 1990s that place masculinity within the broader context of modernity, the postwar consumer society, industrialisation, and psychoanalysis. The exhibition also shows more recent and newly commissioned works by artists. They approach masculinity through intimacy, queerness, labour, ethnicity, class, fetishisation, vulnerability, and representation through imagery. The exhibition shows that masculinity is neither stable nor uniform, but a vessel full of contradictions. Authority and aggression exist alongside fragility and banality; control alongside exposure; fantasy alongside failure.

Cover image: Melle, Garden with Pomegranate, 1975, collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, bequest J.G. Oldeboerrigter-van Hilst