Dissecting Queer is a contemporary homage to the nineteenth- century surgeon-anatomist Joseph Maclise, whose anatomical portraits combine clinical precision with idealised depictions of the male body. The exhibition reinterprets Maclise’s medical atlases through a queer lens, asking how his images of cadavers and dissected figures might be read as erotically charged and deeply invested in male beauty.

Focusing on hands, tactile encounters, faces, genitalia and suggestive poses, the works fragment and crop Maclise’s originals to both veil and reveal. Rendered primarily as mezzotints, the images emerge slowly from darkness, encouraging sustained, intimate looking while resisting full access. Images once legitimised by Victorian science and academic convention are reconsidered here as coded sites of desire, where meaning shifts through light, scale and framing.

Drawing on queer theory and concepts of haptic visuality, the exhibition explores what becomes visible and what remains conncealed when historical anatomical imagery is recontextualised for a contemporary audience.