Exhibition PRIVATE VIEW
Times: 5pm-7pm
The Adelaide Salon is delighted to invite you to Private View of the Exhibition MALE GAZE solo exhibition of artist Tony Mentel.
Private View
date: Thursday 30th of April
time: 19:00-22:00
A new exhibition in Hove this May turns to craft, intimacy, and coded histories to examine how queer lives have been recorded—or more often, concealed.
The Male Gaze, presented by The Adelaide Salon, brings together new works by Brighton-based artist Tony Mentel in an exhibition that moves between surface and secrecy, beauty and unease. Working across needlework, tapestry, ceramics and mixed media, Mentel draws on visual languages long dismissed as decorative to tell stories that were never meant to be easily seen.
At first glance, the works seduce: intricate stitching, luminous colour, richly layered textures. But look longer, and something else begins to emerge—fragments of bodies, mythological figures, gestures caught mid-transformation. These are images that do not announce themselves. They reveal slowly, often uncomfortably, as if the viewer has arrived too early—or too late.
Mentel’s practice is rooted in the question of how queer histories survive. While ancient mythologies once held space for fluid identities without apology, later centuries forced those narratives into hiding. Stories became encoded—embedded in ornament, passed through craft traditions, disguised within religious iconography. In The Male Gaze, these coded languages return, not as relics, but as active tools of storytelling.
Religious imagery runs throughout the exhibition, though not as devotion. Instead, Mentel reworks the visual authority of the Church—an institution historically tied to the regulation and erasure of queer experience—transforming saints, symbols and sacred forms into carriers of alternative narratives. What was once used to exclude is here reclaimed as a site of expression.
Material is central. Using reclaimed fabrics, beads, and objects worn close to the body, Mentel builds works that carry traces of lived experience—touch, time, and proximity embedded within their surfaces. These materials do not simply illustrate memory; they hold it.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a deeply personal act of remembrance. The Male Gaze is dedicated in part to George and Harry, two men from Mentel’s youth in Waltham Abbey who were ostracised during the AIDS crisis of the early 1990s. Their story—of visibility, loss, and quiet erasure—lingers throughout the work, shaping its emotional and political weight.
By working within mediums historically marginalised and often associated with women’s labour, Mentel also challenges the structures that have defined artistic value. His practice occupies a space where authorship, gender, and legitimacy remain unsettled—where what was once overlooked becomes central.
Presented as part of the Brighton Festival Open Houses, The Male Gaze transforms a domestic interior into a site of encounter—intimate, layered, and quietly confrontational.
This is not an exhibition that declares itself. It asks to be approached slowly. To look again. To recognise what has always been there, just beneath the surface.
Exhibition Details
Title: The Male Gaze
Artist: Tony Mentel
Dates: 1–25 May 2026 (Weekends only) Opening Hours: 11:00–17:00
27 Adelaide Crescent
Hove
BN3 2JH
