Robert Knoke Bruce LaBruce: Henzel Studio Collaborations Art Pillow

For over a quarter-century the auteur/provocateur known as Bruce LaBruce has been disrupting, dissecting, and disrobing in the name of cinema. Blasted into the demimonde of underground punk moviemaking with his feature debut, No Skin Off My Ass, LaBruce quickly established that, while he was certainly game for exploring the messy, sticky zones of fringe film, he was actually the unholy product of arthouse auteurism. From Robert Altman to Federico Fellini and Werner Herzog, LaBruce mines the sacred texts of the canon and inserts his own revolutionary gay-sex-positive narratives. Layered with scathing wit and a fundamental rejection of capitalist control over the mind and body, his films and photographs take to task the mainstream porn industry as well as Hollywood. In this spirit, he has collaborated with actors—like Slava Mogutin, Tony Ward, and Francois Sagat—who swing between art and commerce, fashion and filth, the avant-garde and the boulevard. Bruce LaBruce’s particular brand of regal queer fecundity has spawned a generation of feral filmmakers (and ravenous audiences).

Henzel Studio translates the work into a rug. The Swedish studio's artist programme commissions artists and estates to create rugs as works in their own right, authored by the artist, hand-made in limited editions and meant for the floor as much as the wall.

Robert Knoke gained worldwide recognition over the past ten years for his large-scale drawings of personalities shaping contemporary culture. He explores the genre of portraiture and its role in an era dominated by photography, redefining the genre for the 21st century. People that have sat for Robert Knoke include Iris Apfel, Fabien Baron, Bret Easton Ellis, Nicola Formichetti, Gilbert & George, Gossip, Debbie Harry, Roni Horn, Marc Jacobs, The Kills, Terence Koh, Rick Owens, Andrée Putman, Patti Smith, Casey Spooner, Michael Stipe, Liza Thorn, Lawrence Weiner and Olivier Zahm, to name a few.