Keith Boadwee

In a career spanning more than 30 years, Keith Boadwee has produced a body of work mainly made up of photographs, drawings and paintings that are as disconcerting as they are striking. At times created in a manner close to performance, as for example the “enema paintings,” his frankly erotic and scatological works stretch the limits of decency, in a similar vein to Viennese Actionism or Paul McCarthy, but with added candor. Treading the boundary between satire and frankness, Boadwee approaches the most subversive subjects with a disarmingly delicate touch. In a constant dialog with the history of art, the artist revisits renowned works in a humorous, erotic or unreservedly unsavory manner. Recently, he has introduced frogs and dogs into his paintings, as a device intended to expose heteronormative notions of identity and desire. This use of anthropomorphism has allowed him to treat thorny subjects with a lightness, finesse and sense of humor generally absent from traditional portraiture.

Keith Boadwee was born in Meridian, Mississippi in 1961 and currently lives in Emeryville in California. He is a graduate of UCLA and the University of Berkeley, CA. He has enjoyed numerous solo shows including exhibitions at Peres Projects, LA, White Columns, NYC and the Atelier 34zero Museum, Jette, Belgium. In 2021, Nicole Eisenmann invited him to exhibit at the Flag Art Foundation in New York. He has participated in many collective and thematic exhibitions such as those of AA Bronson at the Salzburger Kunstverein and Grazer Kunstverein in Austria, the MoMA PS1, Long Island, NY, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, the Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco, The MOCA, LA, and the New Museum, NYC.