Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland

This bold catalogue brings together the work of two cultural icons for the very first

time: Beryl Cook (1926–2008) and Tom of Finland (1920–1991). It was inspired by the

2024 exhibition Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland at Studio Voltaire in London.

Beryl Cook was a painter renowned for her exuberant style and descriptions of everyday

life. Her work captures the social milieu of the areas she lived in and visited, notably

Plymouth. Her most enduring images are of larger-than-life women carousing in

nightclubs, eating in cafés or enjoying ribald hen parties, rendered in graphic and

colourful forms. Cook’s work came to prominence in the mid-1970s and she quickly

became known as one of Britain’s best-loved artists, highly recognised for her distinctive

works, which are both celebratory and provocative.

Tom of Finland’s pioneering depictions of homosexual machismo in his images of

bikers, soldiers, cowboys, sailors and labourers broadly represent queer, leather and

muscle communities. A master draughtsman, he used his works to give form to an

imaginative universe that, in turn, helped fuel real-world liberation movements and had

significant influence on a wide range of cultural figures including the Village People,

Freddie Mercury, Jean Paul Gaultier and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland puts their work into conversation for the first time. The

pairing is perhaps unexpected, yet immediate and compelling relationships between

their practices are evident. Fundamentally, both artists employed a sustained and

coherent way of hyper-realising the body in images that celebrate pleasure and deny

shame. Together, their works reveal interconnected ideas surrounding sexuality, gender,

taste and class.

Artist and writer Huw Lemmey has contributed an incisive new essay exploring

the queer contexts inherent to Tom of Finland’s work, but that also finds latent

resonance in Cook’s paintings of gay bars and shapely women. He further considers

the commercial forms of distribution that made their complex bodies of works highly

accessible.

Spanning five decades of paintings, drawings and archival materials, this companion

catalogue contributes to new readings of the artists’ practices and their enduring impact

on popular culture.