LIVE BIG, LOVE HARD - REX - Untitled print
$566.00
REX
Untitled
1982
Vintage single print
$400
----
REX
(1943?-2024)
Abandoned at birth, his real name and exact birthday are unknown, but references indicate a date in the 1940s.
An early career in fashion illustration took him to Paris, London, and New York. "His fondest memories ... [were] the 'Cottages', the t-rooms, the public pissoirs, temples conceived and existing solely to bring relief to the male member, not distinguishing between straight or gay, and unconcerned with superficial conditions like color or religion, or how old or young, how pretty or ugly, how rich or poor the cock is."
His distinctively styled black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings quickly became synonymous with an emerging S&M graphic style, with contemporaries like Tom of Finland, Dom Orejudos aka Etienne, Steve Masters, and Luger. Robert Mapplethorpe explored similar themes on the East Coast.
He legally changed his name sometime in the 1970s or early '80s to be purposefully vague and untraceable by the police, as hardcore gay fetish art was still unwelcome in the conservative and homophobic culture of the era.
As Jack Fritscher, editor of Drummer Magazine declared, “Rex is an artist of urban toilets, blue-collar hotels, filthy construction workers, greasy gas jockeys, muscled bikers, tattooed fighters, beautiful young homeless bums ... ex-cons, armpit-sweaty beautiful studs needing head – all these unshaved ‘lone wolves’ in jockstraps, leather, boots, and torn tanktops ... who pay-per-night in sleaze-bag hotels where sailors, Marines, cops, and drifters lie back on stained mattresses, the smoke of their cigarettes drifting out the crack of their rooms, down to the toilet where the cracked urinal drips beer piss, and the graffiti-covered stall is drilled with gloryholes …”
On July 1, 1981, REX opened his own gallery, Rexwerk, in his South of Market (SOMA) studio on Hallam Street in San Francisco. Only ten days later it was destroyed in a fire that could not have come at a worse time, for July 1981 was also the same month the first case of (what a year later was called) AIDS was diagnosed in the city of San Francisco.
REX eventually moved to culturally liberal Amsterdam, and passed away in March, 2024.