Krzysztof Strzelecki, Golden Shower/Waterfall Jump, 2024, Glazed ceramic, platinum lustre, and acrylic (Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York)
Tinkle. Tinkle. Tinkle. Immediately upon entering Krzysztof Strzelecki’s solo exhibition Rendezvous at Anat , my ears pricked up at the splish-splash of watery drippy-droppings trickling out at a heroically steady stream. The constant dribble sounded like some derelict crept into the gallery for a sneaky whizz in a corner. Unlikely, sure, but it’s not as if there are many options to use the bathroom with the all-too-limited public restroom options in New York. Plus, would it be all that surprising considering many of the swanky galleries now inhabiting Tribeca chose the stale urine-stinking Cortlandt Alley, just around the corner from Anat , as their nouvelle adresse, fighting for sensory attention with decades upon decades of caked-on piss? Wait, now I kind of have to go!
A triggered bladder aching for release is the perfect physical response to Rendezvous, a tribute to toilet love through a ceramic men’s-only bacchanalia of fucking, sucking, yanking, ass-licking, and, yes, enthusiastically drenching (and drenched) golden showers. Happy Pride! While I find watching as pleasurable as the next bug-eyed voyeur, although Strzelecki’s little colorful glazed etchings aren’t exactly porno smut as horny as they are (I’m convinced a Sniffies cum dump party could look quaint in ceramic), it’s the artist’s unexpected choice of form that raises his ceramics to pure, pervert joy. Rendezvous drags the private, or semi-private, space of the bathroom into public view, through a series of urinals, both single and multi-headed (for easier peeking at a neighbor), sink-fountains, and large white tiled walls that look as if they were chiseled from the long-gone New St. Marks Baths, stained with barely perceptible ectoplasmic figural imprints of all the years of consensual groping.
Installation view of Krzysztof Strzelecki’s Rendezvous at Anat (Courtesy the artist and Anat , Los Angeles / New York)
Though it’s hard to see all those ghostly tiled walls without thinking of the Baths—or their remnants still lingering around at Barcade on St. Marks, if you can stand it, Strzelecki honors another famous NYC cruising hotspot more directly. A coded nod for those in the know, a central display of urinal sculptures is bisected with a chain-linked fence affixed with a sign that reads, “Laying In Trough Prohibited.” This sign should be familiar to any denizen of the storied West Side leather bar, the Eagle, not only serving as a lineage of bathroom bedroom eyes but a winking warning to gallery-goers that these art-urinals are not for use or submissive prostrating. The advice is worth offering, considering that Strzelecki’s urinals, despite their delicate depravity and diminutive size, look as if they could potentially function, particularly topped with their utilitarian silvery flusher.
In an interview with Interior Design, the Polish artist, who also lives and works in London, explains that his urinal series began with a newfound fascination with the American toilet flush:
“I found it so erotic and beautiful. We don’t really have them in Europe—this physical object that is so chunky that you interact it. We mostly just have a button to press, or contactless ones you wave at. This very dirty way of flushing toilets—apparently I was doing it wrong, touching it with my hand. Apparently you should just kick it with your foot?”
It wasn’t until I was confronted with numerous art-urinals, realistically mounted with these shiny flushes like crowns, that I realized I agreed with him. I, too, appreciate the singular filthy beauty of the toilet flush, a handle that most of us try to avoid touching in public restrooms like the plague. Which just might be lingering on its metallic surfaces if you don’t watch out! The toilet flusher is so germy, so rotten, so phallic. Given their place of honor on Strzelecki’s urinals, the flush feels like some sort of metal gear that should be affixed to leatherwear! Whoever thought a toilet handle could be so hot?
Detail of Krzysztof Strzelecki, Group Shower, 2024, Glazed ceramic, platinum lustre, and acrylic (Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York)
Certainly, the vibrant cavalcade of orgiastic pleasure in paradise helps heighten the flush’s inherent eroticism. In Golden Shower/Waterfall Jump, a man in an itty red Speedo makes a death-defying plunge down a waterfall, as men surrounding the water hook up precariously close to the edge of cliffs. At the very base of Golden Shower/Waterfall Jump, framed in the same bathroom tiles as the wall-mounted mosaics, populated with similar ethereally fucking figures, a blonde man swims through the waters in place of a urinal cake. Nearby, a multicolored and multiethnic group of men mutually pleasure each other in a tangle of flesh, abs, and dicks, surrounded by orange, purple, blue, and pink leaves in Underwater. Like the waterlogged figure in Golden Shower/Waterfall Jump, another dude, mostly visible by his round peachy butt in the crystal blue waters, swims towards a partner. And if those urine-less water sports were too frigid for you, Group Shower features a man sitting below a gaggle of de-pantsed bros who dribble on him like the sounds I heard on my arrival at Anat Egbi, as evidenced by the yellow droplets on the pure white front of the sculpture.
I’ll admit, I’ve been vocal about being bored by contemporary gay art that depicts sex with solely ripped, idealized male bodies, particularly when the dick pics are framed as some sort of radical artistic gesture. So retro! Though given how backward everything is moving in this country and fast, maybe it’ll feel great again very soon! Plus, the recent endless outrage and discourse over Sabrina Carpenter’s new hair-pulling album cover is proof that pearl-clutching is still popular in some circles (Lighten up!). However, Strzelecki’s erotic ceramics are an exception; they feel fresh with their sheer euphoria, blissful playfulness, and a touch of charming antique preciousness. Though much more brilliant in color, they remind me of randy Dionysian scenes on Grecian pottery—or on the replica dishware served at the family dinner in The Birdcage. And in researching for this essay, I learned the artist was more directly influenced by the amusingly prim Victorian and Edwardian painted floral toilets. An ornamental flourish that Des Esseintes would certainly approve of!
Krzysztof Strzelecki, To Be Da Best Glory Hole, 2024, Glazed ceramic, platinum lustre, and acrylic (Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York)
Though I’m tickled by making decorative decadence more overt, because I’m a grime-lover at heart with a fetish for bathroom art, my favorite urinal piece is To Be Da Best Glory Hole, which stands as a mini-monument to masking taped glory holes and their hidden surprises, as well as bathroom graffiti like “U Suck???,” which is more of a come-on than a childish insult. The back of To Be Da Best Glory Hole also features a tragically scrawled eulogy that reads, “This used to be da best glory hole,” like an epitaph to anonymous encounters from glory(hole) days gone by. What happened?! To Be Da Best Glory Hole may be the only work in Rendezvous that overtly tangles with nostalgia for missed connections. There is an out-of-time quality to the show that doesn’t simply revel in a romanticized past hedonistic heyday like the 1970s.
This is not only due to the idyllic, fantastical natural settings embedded in the urinals, but also the other body of work, which expands the show’s landscape to the city. An outlier in the loo-dominated exhibition (though bathrooms do appear like an errant toilet that someone forgot to flush in Singin’ in the Rain), this series consists of freestanding mini-NYC pre-war buildings that viewers can peer into like looky-loos. Obviously, it’s hard to gaze surreptitiously into strangers’ NYC bedrooms without thinking of Rear Window, even though Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff was just satisfying the same curious urge all NYC inhabitants have. However, the series also reminds me of Cruising with its population of entirely gay men filling the apartment buildings and diners of Greenwich Village (Sorry, Vito Russo, Cruising is still one of my most beloved camp classics!).
Krzysztof Strzelecki, Detour, 2024, glazed ceramic, acrylic (Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York)
Rather than solving (or committing) Hitchcock’s or Friedkin’s murders, viewers squinting through the tiny windows will, instead, find as many sex acts as their imaginations can cook up, moving cruising from an outdoor activity into the privacy of shoebox apartments. Sure, there are still some exhibitionists here, like the men boinking on the rooftops next to water towers or, my favorite, the master walking his slave up his stoop on a leash like Alexander Skarsgård in Infinity Pool. Good doggie! Other details are just as entertaining like a guy in a gimp mask or, more wholesome, a kitty waiting for its owner to stop being banged for a second to return for their dinner in Detour. Some of the most delightful elements, though, have less to do with fucking than the unique architecture of New York City, namely the use of rooftops as gardens with small trees and cacti soaking up all that direct sunlight. Though the press release mentions the rise of hookup apps bringing cruising into the home rather than a park bathroom or other public spaces, I couldn’t spot a cellphone in any of the rooms in the city ceramics (granted, so much is going on I could have missed one). Even those jacking off do so without digital assistance, which adds to the show’s out-of-time quality as there’s little else that grounds the scenes within a certain period.
Installation view of Krzysztof Strzelecki’s Rendezvous at Anat (Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York)
Rendezvous is a date with fantasy, a kind of gay Garden of Eden. The artist explicitly depicts a gay Garden of Eden in Waters of Life, minus Eve, of course, although the phallic serpent still slithers through the grass. Shaped similarly to a urinal basin, Waters of Life is a working sink (or fountain) with two faucets running constantly, the source of the tinkling sound ricocheting around the gallery. Waters of Life recalls both a baptismal font and Robert Gober’s unusable sinks (which also engage in baptismal imagery). Seen in the context of Gober, Strzelecki’s work turns back on those impotent sinks and their grim engagement with perceptions of thwarted cleanliness during the height of the AIDS pandemic. There is a type of redemption here—a rebirth and rekindling of the lost sexual cultures mourned by people like Douglas Crimp in the late 1980s. Nearing forty years later, isn’t it appropriate that the way to reclaim cruising is to be (re)baptized in those golden waters?