APPETITE AND THE AESTHETICS OF DESIRE AT MAXIMILLIAN WOLFGANG GALLERY
- Zoe Goetzmann
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Where do the boundaries between consumption and desire begin to blur? Zoë Goetzmann looks back at APPETITE, held last year at Maximillian Wolfgang Gallery, to explore how closely sex and food are entwined in our visual language of want.
Photography courtesy of gallery
Last fall and winter, Maximillian Wolfgang Gallery’s exhibition, APPETITE (November 2025, featuring artists Angel Qin, Adrián Coto, Barney Pau, Guta Galli, Parks Sadler, and Rachel Alexandrou) presented the gallery’s secondary foray into the exploration of sexuality and kink by using food to “peel back the layers of our culture’s entanglement with food and desire, tracing the blurring boundaries between what we eat and what we yearn for.” The gallery spear-headed this curatorial theme in 2024 through its initial show Kink (21 September 2024 - 30 October 2024) featuring artists Makiko Harris, Cece Monroe, Angel Qin, Cat Haland, Petrichor, Ishilla, Parks Sadler, Rosemary Cronin, Anna Michell, Rosanna Dean, and KV Duong.
Through a more minimalist curation (the 2025 show was contained in a small white-wall Shoreditch gallery space), the exhibition’s organisation resisted didacticism, instead allowing material and placement to guide the viewer’s engagement with desire and consumption. The artists’ works surrounded a large physical installation made from vegetation and plant-like materials as the centrepiece for this sexual visual feast. Under the exhibition’s title, APPETITE managed to showcase a variety of mediums from photography to mixed media to video installation to tableware.
Courtesy of Parks Sadler
Parks Sadler, an American artist whose practice focuses on memory and the exploration of the queer archive, and who has already cemented his position as an innovative contemporary artist in the London art scene, presented Tie the Knot in June of last year, an exhibition consisting of a screening and workshop centred on his latest video work. The piece was shown on multiple walls of the art’otel Hoxton's gallery, depicting large-scale close-up projections of the artist’s mouth and tongue as he manipulated a cherry stem, attempting to tie it into a knot. The framing — intimate and tightly cropped — drew the viewer’s attention to the slow, deliberate, repetitious movements of the tongue and stem, transforming a familiar pubescent trick of “schoolyard lore” as the gallery observes into a prolonged, almost ritualistic performance. This familiar act translates to a person’s ability to become “a good kisser.”
Tie The Knot, still, curtesy of Parks Sadler
In APPETITE, Sadler presented three distinctive works: used hotel towels sculpted expertly into hotel-room swans; a smaller video monitor rendering of Tie the Knot; and a series of embroidered underwear (taken, as Sadler once told me, from exes — I suggested once that he call it the queer “thank u, next” series of the art world). Across these works, the artist muses on intimacy, desire, longing, and moments of slight discomfort. Sadlers explores queer and gay representation in the arts through a refined yet distinctly humorous lens: his use of mundane objects allows the artist to take on the role of a documentarian.
Another artist that stood out to me was Adrián Coto, a queer, Latin American visual artist who transposed visceral yet stylised photographic images of sexual poses onto small serving plates. Through the gallery’s playful curation, the dishes were arranged in clustered formations across two walls nestled in one corner of the space. For Coto, the works became a means of highlighting the seen and unseen, revealing selective fragments of staged scenes to viewers. Replicating the images onto dinnerware not only catered to the exhibition’s title, but also introduced a new medium for the artist’s photography — one that felt domestic, utilitarian and perhaps commercially viable.
APPETITE was an opening to the conscious and unconscious that approached the relationship between food and sexuality through both concealed and overt depictions of identity, best seen in both of these artists' works. This years bodes well for those of us interested to see what other sensory relationships Maximillian Wolfgang Gallery might forge through its further posturings on kink.
Photography courtesy of gallery
Zoë Goetzmann is an arts writer and podcaster based in London.
