My Romantic Ideal36 Images
For Slava Mogutin, “Romance is not just about love – it’s about longing, fantasy, and danger.” That should give you some idea about the kind of artworks included in the exiled Russian artist and curator’s new show, My Romantic Ideal, in NYC. Football-themed nudes by Mogutin himself appear alongside explicit portraits by Bruce LaBruce, sun-soaked studies of the male body by Tyler Matthew Oyer, Łukasz Leja’s tender and NSFW take on Las Meninas, and more. All in all, it’s a kaleidoscopic take on romance, as reimagined through an emphatically queer lens.
The exhibition was “born out of necessity and longing,” Mogutin tells Dazed, at a time when queer art, and queer people themselves, are increasingly under threat. “We’re living through a global conservative backlash, book bans, anti-trans laws, war, exile, erasure,” he explains. “Rather than react with fear or compliance, I wanted to respond with beauty, tenderness, and radical eroticism.”
As an artist whose work spans “continents and generations”, Mogutin tapped a selection of artists who he’s collaborated with, admired, or simply shared time and space with – many of whom have shaped the landscape of queer visual culture today. Creative pioneers including LaBruce, Tom Bianchi, Stanley Stellar, and Matt Lambert stand alongside young and emerging talent like Alejandro Ruiz and Ben Prince. Featured artists also include Quil Lemons, Gio Black Peter, Stuart Sandford, Tom Bianchi, and more.
“The selection was intuitive but intentional,” he says. “What ties them together isn’t a singular aesthetic but a shared intensity, honesty, and defiance. Each one of them redefines beauty and intimacy on their own terms, and together, they form a chorus of queer desire in all its raw, exuberant and sometimes messy forms.”
Below, Slava Mogutin tells us more about My Romantic Ideal – from pushing back against traditional and heteronormative visions of desire, to the “extreme” political backdrop that makes such conversations so vital in 2025.
What was the starting point for this show? And why now?
Slava Mogutin: This show was born out of both necessity and longing. The necessity to reclaim space – physical, emotional, artistic – for queer bodies and queer stories. And the longing for intimacy, vulnerability, connection in an increasingly commodified and sanitized world. My Romantic Ideal came together in a moment where the personal and political collide like never before. Now it felt like the right time to reflect on how romance – this often trivialized or heteronormative concept – can be remixed, reimagined, and redefined through a queer lens.
Queerness is on billboards, but still being beaten down in the streets
How would you characterise the social and political backdrop against which the show is staged?
Slava Mogutin: It’s a landscape of extremes: hypervisibility and violent erasure, rainbow capitalism and systemic oppression. Queerness is on billboards, but still being beaten down in the streets. I’ve always made work in response to political urgency, whether it was getting exiled from Russia for my journalism and activism, or documenting queer communities in the US and around the world. This exhibition is no different. It’s staged against a backdrop of censorship, conformity, and increasing surveillance. But it’s also a love letter to queer resilience, chosen family, and the magic we make in the margins.
What does it mean to reimagine romantic ideals through a queer lens?
Slava Mogutin: The old ideals were never made for us. They excluded us, marginalised us, erased our experiences. Queer romance is inherently revolutionary because it exists outside systems of reproduction, property, and patriarchy. To love and lust as a queer person is to create your own mythology. It’s performance, it’s protest, it’s poetry. By queering romance, we not only reclaim what was denied – we create new ideals of beauty, new paradigms, new ways of manifesting and depicting our sexuality. And that, to me, is radical.
And what does romance mean to you, personally?
Slava Mogutin: Romance is not just about love – it’s about longing, fantasy, and danger. It’s the scent of leather after midnight, the flicker of a cigarette in a stranger’s hand, the way someone touches your scars and makes them sacred. Romance, to me, is political because it refuses to be transactional. It’s about choosing tenderness versus aggression in an increasingly hostile world where queerness is either commodified or weaponized. It’s about being seen, fully and fearlessly. And for those of us who grew up without role models or fairytales that reflected us, it’s about writing our own stories, with rage, with joy, with love.
My Romantic Ideal runs at The Bureau of General Services – Queer Division in NYC until August 31.
