Around Dehner, objects capture the home’s heady mix of the erotic and domestic: a nude photograph of a man in the reflection of a bathroom mirror, a plastic phallus, mugs, figurines, a roll-along drinks trolley with a single bottle of Tom of Finland-branded vodka on top. This past weekend, thousands of miles away in the backstreets of Venice’s northern Cannaregio district, a characteristically leather-clad Dehner – who remains president of the Tom of Finland Foundation – found himself back in Tom House’s living room, albeit a recreation created for the foundation’s new group exhibition ‘AllTogether’ at Studio Cannaregio (23 April – 26 June 2022), supported by Italian fashion label Diesel and curated in association with Paris’ The Community gallery.
As such, Tom House’s 14 rooms claim more than 3,500 works of erotic art and over 100,000 pieces of ephemera, memorabilia and objects from both Tom himself and those who have called the property home over the years – a fittingly expansive collection for the artist’s own outsized legacy.
The Echo Park home – now owned by the Tom of Finland Foundation, which the artist founded with friend, lover, and business partner Durk Dehner in 1984 – is known as ‘Tom House’ and has become an elysium for queer and erotic artists from around the world, who make a pilgrimage to the Los Angeles address to hone their craft in a series of residencies. In the decade before his death, Finland-born Touko Laaksonen (1920 – 1991) – best known by the artistic pseudonym Tom of Finland – lived in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighbourhood, where he spent the final years of his life adding to his prolific catalogue of sexually liberated, libidinally charged illustrations of beefed-up men, which first appeared in Bob Mizer’s homoerotic magazine Physique Pictorial in the 1950s.