Born in 1985, Yokneam Moshava, Israel, Doron Langberg now lives and works in New York. It was at the young age of six that he finished his first oil painting of Ariel from Disney’s Little Mermaid, which already contained the expressive, colourful, and unabashedly queer influences that would later define his practice. But it wasn’t until a few years later, at a Lucian Freud exhibition in the 90s, that he became fully consumed by the communicative potential of painting; it was at this moment he remembers deciding that ‘this is what I want to do with my life”. Langberg grew up in a community that was especially intolerant, so at the age of 21 he sought pasteurs anew at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Since graduating, Langberg has become know for his tender paintings of queer eroticism, which celebrate the physicality of touch. Such intimate scenes of queer passion would once have been censored, but Langberg places them at the forefront of contemporary high culture. His luminous and expansive works aim to capture a queer subjectivity, and explore its interaction with the more traditional artistic subjects of family, belonging, mortality, and love. Alongside his close friend Salman Toor, Langberg is at the forefront of a group that is radically re-defining expectations of queer art, firmly asserting it’s place in the canon. Doron Langberg: “I see what I’m doing as an act of humanizing queerness—not making it sensational or ‘other,’ but making it casual, and making queerness a nexus for other meanings as well.”