Slava Mogutin’s My Romantic Ideal Art Show

When Slava Mogutin’s group art show My Romantic Ideal opened at the LGBT Center in Manhattan in early May, it felt like an exciting nightclub event, with thumping music playing from speakers at just the right volume and an exuberant, avid crowd of attendees. I saw guys I hadn’t seen in years and embraced them; when I went to the restroom, the space was at capacity and I had to wait in a line to get back in, and I waited happily, for the show is crowded with beauty and desire on cheerfully peach-colored walls. I’ve been back to look at “My Romantic Ideal” several times to take in the abundance of all the art, 80 images in total from a wide range of gay male artists, both established and emerging, who were asked by Mogutin to offer him images that represented a romantic ideal.

Artist Jan Wandrag presented Mogutin images that call to mind the romance of city life, where you might fall in love at first sight with a guy you see on the street or the subway (one of his images is on the flyer above). “I have a deep romantic relationship with the streets of New York,” says Wandrag. “People-watching here is mesmerizing and endlessly inspiring. The beauty and power of the city lie in the bodies that inhabit it.” This same impulse feeds the work of Robert Flynt, who submitted images of torsos against maps of the city, as seen below. Flynt says, “The solo image in the show—on the topographic map—was thought of as a more metaphoric, single figure who would/could be a kind of singular ‘romantic ideal’—but being in negative almost entirely ‘unknowable’ as a specific person or even type.”

What struck me most about My Romantic Ideal is the number of attempts at self-love on display from the 28 men Mogutin tapped for this exhibition. Romance for these gay male artists of varying age and experience is on some level about self-acceptance and self-objectification; the younger artists particularly seem to want to be looked at and desired perhaps because this is safer than desiring someone themselves. In a 2025 black-and-white image from Victor Jeffrey II, the double-imaged subject seems to be thinking about penetrating himself, and this is made more Freudian by the background: a wall of safety deposit boxes.

The artist Benjamin Fredrickson has several images in the show, including a vulnerable self-portrait and an image from his “Wedgies” series. “A romantic ideal, to me, is about sharing time, trust, and intimacy with another person—often through the act of photographing,” says Fredrickson. “In that brief moment, vulnerability is captured, creating a shared memory of who we were together. When I turn the camera on myself, I feel that same openness—and ultimately, acceptance.” For the artist known as Ross Collab, this show was an invitation to showcase his love for his long-time boyfriend Cole. “These photos had been sitting on my hard drive for years,” said Collab. “They’re deeply intimate moments with my partner of ten years—snapshots of our love, our life, our play. My romantic ideal is him, and the way we see each other through our camera.” Mogutin himself is represented by the image below of his one-time lover and collaborator, the artist Brian Kenny.

If I could choose just one image that represents this show at its most rebellious and libidinous, it would have to be Miguel Villalobos’s “Untitled (Saeed), Brooklyn” (circa 2009). Villalobos calls the image of Saeed “a souvenir,” which acknowledges that so much of life is transient, that all of life is transient. That’s what gay male connection at its best honors. Yes, Saeed is beautiful standing there naked from behind in that kitchen. But it’s the look on his face that gets to me, a challenging look that is also filled with yearning. Maybe that’s the quality that Mogutin has captured in this show, which is both a reclaiming of a near-lost world and a way to look toward a more liberated, less rules-based future.