Bartholomäus Spranger, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus “She scarce could bare to wait, hardly postpone her joy, she longed to embrace him, scarce contained her frenzied heart. He clapped his hollow palms against his sides and dived into the pool and, as he swam arm over arm, gleamed in the limpid water like, in a guarding dome of crystal glass, white lilies or a figure of ivory. I’ve won, he’s mine! she cried, and flung aside her clothes and plunged far out into the pool and grappled him and, as he struggled, forced her kisses, willy-nilly fondled him, caressed him; now on one side, now the other clung to him as he fought to escape her hold; and so at last entwined him, like a snake seized by the king of birds and borne aloft, which, as it hangs, coils round his head and claws and with its tail entwines his spreading wings.” “Hermaphroditus fought back, denied the Nympha her joy; she strained the more; her clinging body seemed fixed fast to his. Fool, fight me as you will, she cried, You’ll not escape! Ye Gods ordain no day shall ever dawn to part us twain! Her prayer found gods to hear; both bodies merged in one, both blended in one form and face. As when a gardener sets a graft and sees growth seal the join and both mature together, thus, when in the fast embrace their limbs were knit, they two were two no more, nor man, nor woman — one body then that neither seemed and both.” — Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.285
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Bartholomäus Spranger, Salmacis and Hermaphroditus

“She scarce could bare to wait, hardly postpone her joy, she longed to embrace him, scarce contained her frenzied heart. He clapped his hollow palms against his sides and dived into the pool and, as he swam arm over arm, gleamed in the limpid water like, in a guarding dome of crystal glass, white lilies or a figure of ivory. I’ve won, he’s mine! she cried, and flung aside her clothes and plunged far out into the pool and grappled him and, as he struggled, forced her kisses, willy-nilly fondled him, caressed him; now on one side, now the other clung to him as he fought to escape her hold; and so at last entwined him, like a snake seized by the king of birds and borne aloft, which, as it hangs, coils round his head and claws and with its tail entwines his spreading wings.”

“Hermaphroditus fought back, denied the Nympha her joy; she strained the more; her clinging body seemed fixed fast to his. Fool, fight me as you will, she cried, You’ll not escape! Ye Gods ordain no day shall ever dawn to part us twain! Her prayer found gods to hear; both bodies merged in one, both blended in one form and face. As when a gardener sets a graft and sees growth seal the join and both mature together, thus, when in the fast embrace their limbs were knit, they two were two no more, nor man, nor woman — one body then that neither seemed and both.”

— Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.285

Katy Grannan, Gail and Dale, Ocean Beach “Lady into Fox features Gail and Dale, two middle-aged transsexuals and best friends whose experience in the world is mediated by romantic escapism and willful delusion. Grannan thoroughly embraces her subjects’ vision of themselves, their interpretation of femininity, and the pleasure they derive from gender mimicry and performance. The photographs, however, also describe the pair’s solitary interior lives and their deeper existential need to be visible.”
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Katy Grannan, Gail and Dale, Ocean Beach

“Lady into Fox features Gail and Dale, two middle-aged transsexuals and best friends whose experience in the world is mediated by romantic escapism and willful delusion. Grannan thoroughly embraces her subjects’ vision of themselves, their interpretation of femininity, and the pleasure they derive from gender mimicry and performance. The photographs, however, also describe the pair’s solitary interior lives and their deeper existential need to be visible.”

Antony and the Johnsons, Shake That Devil
(Another World, 2008)

“I think someone who seems to embody both masculine and feminine experience can have some additional insight — I often go to music as a source of healing for myself, so it may not be the musician as much as the music.”

— Antony Hegarty

Charlie White, Teen and Transgender Comparative Study n°3 The series is a correlation of two stages of transformation, pairing teen girls (12-14) with like adult male-to-female transsexuals. The Teen and Transgender Comparative Study series is part of a larger project titled The Girl Studies, which includes a short 35mm film titled American Minor and an animation titled OMG BFF LOL.
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Charlie White, Teen and Transgender Comparative Study n°3

The series is a correlation of two stages of transformation, pairing teen girls (12-14) with like adult male-to-female transsexuals. The Teen and Transgender Comparative Study series is part of a larger project titled The Girl Studies, which includes a short 35mm film titled American Minor and an animation titled OMG BFF LOL.

Jenny Saville, Passage “I was searching for a body that was between genders. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts. Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn’t have existed and I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender — a sort of gender landscape.”
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Jenny Saville, Passage

“I was searching for a body that was between genders. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts. Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn’t have existed and I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender — a sort of gender landscape.”

Odd Nerdrum, Hermaphrodite The alchemists believed that the hermaphrodite was the metaphorically perfect being, one that embodies all that is masculine (the Sun, knowledge) with all that is feminine (the Moon, feeling). Nerdrum recalls this metaphor through paintings such as Hermaphrodite in which he identifies with the perfect being. In Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art, Donald Kuspit addresses this tendency of male artists: “The whole artificial cosmos that art is — its inherent theatricality, exhibitionism — is explicable in terms of fetishism, down to the tendency of the male artist to both abuse and idealize, dispute and identify with the female figure, often simultaneously.” — JE Morales (via Virtual Mo)
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Odd Nerdrum, Hermaphrodite

The alchemists believed that the hermaphrodite was the metaphorically perfect being, one that embodies all that is masculine (the Sun, knowledge) with all that is feminine (the Moon, feeling).

Nerdrum recalls this metaphor through paintings such as Hermaphrodite in which he identifies with the perfect being. In Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art, Donald Kuspit addresses this tendency of male artists: “The whole artificial cosmos that art is — its inherent theatricality, exhibitionism — is explicable in terms of fetishism, down to the tendency of the male artist to both abuse and idealize, dispute and identify with the female figure, often simultaneously.”

— JE Morales (via Virtual Mo)