London Art Fair Selects: Gemma Rolls-Bentley
Gemma Rolls-Bentley has been at the forefront of contemporary art for almost two decades, working passionately to amplify the work of queer artists and provide a platform for art that explores LGBTQIA+ identity. Here she selects works from London Art Fair that shine a light on queer love and life.
Inspired by London Art Fair’s partnership with Charleston, the modernist home of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, the 2024 Platform section of the fair brings together art that shines a light on queer love and life selected by guest curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley. In the early 20th century, the historic house and artist studio became a queertopia for members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa’s sister Virginia Woolf. In Virginia’s 1928 novel Orlando, an imaginative biography of her lover and muse Vita Sackville-West in which the protagonist changes sex from male to female, she wrote:
“A million candles burnt in him without his being at the trouble of lighting a single one.”
At a time when LGBTQIA+ life is increasingly under threat in the UK and globally, Rolls-Bentley calls on the words of queer ancestors as she brings together art that reflects the resilience, beauty and passion of queer love and life.
Whoever we are, hearing stories from the past that we can relate to and seeing ourselves reflected in art and culture is vital. It’s how we begin to understand and form our own identities, to develop a sense of belonging and validation. In much of the world, historical traces of LGBTQIA+ life have been suppressed or even erased. The stories that do survive are often only representative of a particular perspective brought to light through the privileges of gender, race or class. We can’t help but wonder about all the queer lives that didn’t get archived, or were never even lived to their full potential. As we take inspiration from the ancestors whose stories we do have access to, it becomes all the more important for contemporary queer life to be illuminated in art and culture.
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Gemma Rolls-Bentley has been at the forefront of contemporary art for almost two decades, working passionately to amplify the work of queer artists and provide a platform for art that explores LGBTQIA+ identity. Curating exhibitions and building collections internationally, she curated the ‘Brighton Beacon Collection’, the largest permanent display of queer art in the UK, the Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival in London, the group exhibition ‘Dreaming of Home’ at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in NYC and she hosts the museum’s accompanying podcast series. She is a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, co-chair for the charity Queercircle and she sits on the Courtauld Association Committee. She spent a decade working at the intersection of art and technology, holding positions of Chief Curator at Avant Arte and Curatorial Director at Artsy. Her debut book ‘Queer Art: From Canvas to Club and the Spaces Between’ will be published in 2024 by Frances Lincoln.
