Location: Emeryville, CA
Medium: Painting, drawing, photography, performance
Website: keithboadwee.com
Keith Boadwee was born in 1961 in Meridian, Mississippi, and has lived and worked in Emeryville, California throughout his career. He received a BA from UCLA in 1989, where he studied under Paul McCarthy and Chris Burden, and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000. He has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts. He is represented by Dittrich & Schlechtriem in Berlin, The Pit in Los Angeles, and Climate Control in San Francisco.
His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA PS1 (2006), The FLAG Art Foundation (2020–21), the Salzburger Kunstverein (2015), Atelier 34zero Muzeum in Brussels (2017), and Deborah Schamoni Galerie in Munich (2016). In 2020, he was the subject of a career-defining presentation at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, where Nicole Eisenman — recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth/FLAG Art Foundation Prize — invited Boadwee to share the exhibition as a testament to their three-decade friendship and creative kinship.
Boadwee is a conceptual artist and painter whose performative practice explores identity, queer embodiment, and art history’s canon with caustic humor. He became widely known in the early 1990s for his Enema Paintings — in which he expelled paint from his rectum onto canvas, simultaneously critiquing and honoring the gestural machismo of Abstract Expressionism while making himself both the artist and the medium. Working across photography, painting, and drawing, he interweaves homoerotic self-portraiture with reconstructions of canonical paintings by artists from Van Gogh to Polke, inserting his own body into art history as both subject and subversive agent. Over time he has expanded into overlapping bodies of work, from expressive figurative paintings to a vast ongoing archive of scatological drawings in which feces serve as a vehicle for examining human flaws, pleasure, and the abject. His long-running collaborative project Club Paint deploys his drawings as blueprints for paintings made with occasional collaborators, always under his full narrative and aesthetic control.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your profile.