The Adelaide Salon Presents Exhibition Male Gaze by Tony Mentel
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Exhibition Open 1–25 May 2026 | Weekends, 11am–5pm
A new exhibition in Hove this May turns to craft, intimacy, and coded histories to examine how queer lives have been recorded—or more often, concealed.
The Male Gaze, presented by The Adelaide Salon, brings together new works by Brighton-based artist Tony Mentel in an exhibition that moves between surface and secrecy, beauty and unease. Working across needlework, tapestry, ceramics and mixed media, Mentel draws on visual languages long dismissed as decorative to tell stories that were never meant to be easily seen.
At first glance, the works seduce: intricate stitching, luminous colour, richly layered textures. But look longer, and something else begins to emerge—fragments of bodies, mythological figures, gestures caught mid-transformation. These are images that do not announce themselves. They reveal slowly, often uncomfortably, as if the viewer has arrived too early—or too late.
Mentel’s practice is rooted in the question of how queer histories survive. While ancient mythologies once held space for fluid identities without apology, later centuries forced those narratives into hiding. Stories became encoded—embedded in ornament, passed through craft traditions, disguised within religious iconography. In The Male Gaze, these coded languages return, not as relics, but as active tools of storytelling.
Religious imagery runs throughout the exhibition, though not as devotion. Instead, Mentel reworks the visual authority of the Church—an institution historically tied to the regulation and erasure of queer experience—transforming saints, symbols and sacred forms into carriers of alternative narratives. What was once used to exclude is here reclaimed as a site of expression.
Material is central. Using reclaimed fabrics, beads, and objects worn close to the body, Mentel builds works that carry traces of lived experience—touch, time, and proximity embedded within their surfaces. These materials do not simply illustrate memory; they hold it.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a deeply personal act of remembrance.
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