Patrick Angus Rediscovered: From Arkansas Storage to New York Gallery

Patrick Angus (1953–1992), a California-born painter who documented New York's gay subculture during the AIDS crisis, is finally receiving recognition decades after his death. His works, long stored in boxes at his mother's home in Fort Smith, Arkansas, were rediscovered by Italian opera and theater director Fabio Cherstich in 2013. Cherstich, after seeing an image of Angus's painting of a porn cinema, tracked down the artist's mother, Betty Angus, who had preserved hundreds of paintings, drawings, and sketches. Cherstich's research led to a 2016 monograph by Hatje Cantz, a 2017 retrospective at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, and a 2019 exhibition at Long Beach Museum of Art. Now, Bortolami Gallery in New York is showing three paintings and a selection of works on paper through February 27, 2021. The exhibition includes the porn cinema painting that first captivated Cherstich, as well as sketches, pastels, and watercolors depicting intimate domestic scenes. Angus's work was previously shown only twice in New York, both in 1992, the year of his death: at Ganymede Gallery and posthumously at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Notably, David Hockney purchased six of Angus's paintings in the early 1990s after a controversial, censored exhibition at the Santa Barbara Institute of Art. A concurrent Hockney exhibition at the Morgan Library highlights the influence of Hockney on Angus's work.