A defining feature of Steve Locke’s practice is its focus on the vulnerability of male desire. Out of this exploration comes a recurring theme in the artist’s work: the image of a floating man’s head with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. Locke’s ongoing series of Tongue Paintings refute traditional representations of masculinity through their open mouths. The works’ floating heads—at once comedic, disturbing, and suggestive—embody “a sense of desperation” and “the nakedness of desire,” laying the foundation for a subversive model of male portraiture that resists the trappings of triumphalism to instead foreground pathos and vulnerability.
