Art + Desire: Erotic Review Issue 4 Launch

Art + Desire

Erotic Review Issue 4 Launch

Saturday 18th October

Reference Point, London

19:00 for 19:30 (running time 1h 15mins approx)

Join us for the launch of the Erotic Review's Issue 4, with a conversation on Art + Desire with Richard Malone, Rebecca Birrell and Alex Quicho, and readings by Mary Katharine Tramontana and sage o-a. We invite you to stay for a drink and music after the readings to celebrate.

Plus: Sale of 30 exclusive, numbered art editions made by Richard Malone from copies of Erotic Review issue 4, curated by guest art curator of issue 4 Clare Cumberlidge.

Richard Malone is an Irish artist and designer whose practice centres on experiences of queerness, class, place and otherness. Recent solo shows include A Record of Tenderness at The Dock in Leitrim and Knot Bind Gesture Bend at the National Gallery of Ireland. Malone exhibits internationally and their work is represented in the collections of MoMA, the National Gallery of Victoria and the V&A. In 2023, they won the Golden Fleece Award, Ireland’s most prestigious award for contemporary art, and created poem in the dark about sadness/filíocht faoi bhrón, as an dorchadas for the Central Hall commission at the Royal Academy, London.

Rebecca Birrell is a writer, curator and art historian. Her first book, This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Her second book, a novel, will be published by Picador in the summer of 2026.

Alex Quicho is a theorist and research director in London. Her practice incorporates critical writing, performative lectures, and moving image to focus on how emerging technologies warp social reality and vice-versa. She is the author of Girlstack (2023-) and Small Gods (2020).

Mary Katharine Tramontana is a Berlin-based American writer, artist, poet and author of Serious Pleasures. Her work on sexual politics and culture appears in The New York Times, Esquire, Playboy, the Guardian, The Atlantic and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She’s exhibited photography internationally, with two Fotografiska-recommended solo shows in Berlin, and given talks on eroticism and art, collaborating with cultural institutions around the world, like Reina Sofía and Academy of Arts Berlin. A Frieze bursary recipient, she’s also worked as a sexuality research assistant at the Kinsey Institute. Her next book, LUST, co-written with Erika Lust, is forthcoming in autumn 2026.

sage o-a is a non-binary chef and writer living in london. they run a cafe and events space in hackney wick called thingy cafe with their partner. sage is working on their first novel, a queer erotic ghost story and this piece, bungee cord, formed the building blocks for that project. first drafted written on a plane back from copenhagen, 'bungee cord' is an essay-cum-memoir piece-cum-short story about new relationship energy and the joy of going to queer kink-friendly spaces. it was also the first piece of erotica they had ever written.