Rex (artist)

Rex (artist)
Born	Unconfirmed Birth unknown USA
Nationality	American
Known for	Drawing

Rex is a living American artist and illustrator closely associated with homosexual fetish art of 1970s and 1980s New York and San Franscisco. He avoids photographs and does not discuss his personal life. His drawings influenced gay culture though graphics made for famous nightclubs including the Mineshaft and his influence on artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Much censored, he has remained a shadowy figure saying that his drawings "defined who I became" and that there are "no other ‘truths’ out there".

Abandoned at birth, his real name and exact birthday are unknown, but references indicate a date in the 1940s. His childhood was spent as a ward of the state on a farm in a small northeastern town. He ran away to New York as a teenager in the 1950s, where he lived among beatniks and on the streets of Greenwich Village. While still in his teens he became the protégé of a fashion designer, who paid for two years study at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He later worked there in fashion illustration and commercial art, a career that brought him to London and Paris in the late 1960s, while maintaining an apartment on Saint Mark's Place in Manhattan's East Village.

Disillusioned with commercial art, he dropped out for several years but re-emerged in the 1970s as one of the leading figures visualizing the fetish and S&M subculture in New York and later San Francisco. His distinctively styled black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings, quickly became synonymous with an emerging S&M graphic idiom that included artists Tom of Finland, Dom Orejudos (aka Etienne and Stephen), Steve Masters (‘Mike’ Miksche, born David Leo Miksche, 1925-1964), and Luger (Jim French (photographer), born 1932). The raw sexual energy of REX's early drawings resonated with a leather scene that was just emerging in Greenwich Village, Chelsea and the meatpacking district.

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