Nine Artworks To Turn You On In Isolation

Being isolated at home can lead us not only to cherish our limited surroundings but to view them through different eyes.

- Osman Can Yerebakan

The lobster-shaped vintage cake mold on your wall may suddenly resemble a penis; a Sufjan Stevens song you never noticed before may become your new jam. This decelerated pace allows us to enjoy previously overlooked pleasures, including those residing in our bodies. And given our new abundance of time, sex, in all its forms, is ours to revel in.

Needless to say, art has always flirted with sex, from Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa to Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With. There’s no shortage of opportunities for stimulation while social distancing, online or off, and art offers limitless doses of love, kink, romance and sex. It allows us to tune in to ways its creators challenge taboos and use the power of sex to provoke.

Below, we share a collection of contemporary artworks to turn you on. They depict sex, but they also manifest our right to love, to fuck—to exist.