Archives – October 28, 2025
DC Moore Gallery presents Duane Michals: The Nature of Desire.
Featuring the artist’s signature photographs with hand-written text and sequences, this exhibition focuses on Michals’s decades-long exploration of desire of the male form. Included in the exhibition are selections from Michals’s highly regarded bodies of work inspired by poets Walt Whitman and Constantine Cavafy, shown at DC Moore Gallery for the first time.
“In photography I tried to reveal to myself the exact point of desire,” Michals explains. “When someone is desired, why? What are we responding to?”
Through his innovative sequences and photographs with handwritten captions, Michals approaches desire through language and metaphor. Playing with language, Michals both incorporates text within the photograph, writes directly onto the photograph, and creates new languages of signs using symbolic objects and choreographed movements. Rather than direct the viewer towards an object of desire, he uncovers the narrative meanings, the cause-and-effect relationships within the feeling.
In his caption for The Nature of Desire (1986), Michals writes:
Our lives are just one moment,
A breath imagined by the senses,
And that moment is a great thought,
And that thought is a desire,
The urge to being and to be love,
All at once, altogether, the same.
Duane Michals : The Nature of Desire
October 17 – November 22, 2025
DC Moore Gallery
535 W 22nd St 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011
www.dcmooregallery.com
