Fans of homoerotic drawings will want to check out the "Keep Your Timber Limber" exhibition which debuts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London this week. The free exhibition, which features works by Tom of Finland, Mike Kuchar, and Cary Kwok among others, was curated by Sarah McCrory. The show is free and runs from June 19th to September 8th, 2013.

Lee Chen Dao is a figurative painter based out of Taipei, Taiwan. His playful and vibrant oil paintings marry the sensuality of adult eroticism with a gleeful sense of childish delight, unabashedly celebrating (and perhaps just as well quietly chastising) modern society's free-wheeling and almost infantile pursuit of pure pleasure. Superhero masks, girl on girl wrestling, strip poker antics, nothing is off limits in Dao's strange and provocative world.

The staff was going back through some of our more design, fashion heavy features from the past few years, and we remembered how much we love the works of NYC-based art director and illustrator, Deanne Cheuk. Originally from Perth, Australia, Cheuk has done work for American Express, Dell, Lane Crawford, Levi's, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, Nokia, Nike, Converse, Olay, Sprint, Swatch, Target, MTV, Gap, Real Simple, The Guardian, T Magazine and The New York Times Magazine... and Conan. Here is our interview with the artist from April, 2010.

Born in Tacoma, WA, James Benjamin Franklin decided to pursue painting as a career after visiting New York City on a high school trip, and in 1999 he graduated from the Art Center College of Design. Over the years he has developed a uniquely stilted yet seductive style, exploring the awkward, neglected moments of human interactions, the disregarded pauses in the midst of grander exploits. Franklin currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NYC, and his artistic influences include Woody Allen, Richard Diebenkorn, Bonnard, and Steve Martin.

After moving to Austin, Texas, in July 2010, painter Orlando Sanchez embarked on a fresh and exciting journey to figure out a new trajectory for his artistic ambitions, sniffing out the roots of his inspirations to create and explore a new body of art. He quickly landed on the simple and universal concept of beauty, whether in nature or of the human body, and his latest series of work showcases his progress towards capturing its essence.

Born in New York in 1971, Derek Gores is a collage artist based in Melbourne, Florida, and an alumni of The Rhode Island School of Design. Through recycling ephemeral fragments of magazines, labels, data, and assorted analog and digital materials, Gores creates loosely figurative works on canvas, teasing the viewer with fleeting details suggesting the outlines of a body or the pink curves of a woman's lips.

In this series entitled "Together, yet apart," Serbian painter Milan Hrnjazovic explores a young couple's intimacy through distortions and scattered parts of their bodies, creating new, recognizable shapes, such as an egg or a silhouette of an embryo, that symbolize the procreative function of the sexual act. In addition to the bodies' gestural meanings, their twisted forms suggest  the kind of turbulent yet passionate relationship that has the potential to engender just as much profound happiness as it can bitter misery.

Although never an official member, Paul Delvaux (b. 1897 - d. 1994) was a Belgian painter associated with the Belgian Surrealist movement. Delvaux was greatly influenced by his contemporary, René Magritte, yet his paintings also possessed their own twist on the realist tradition of older Flemish artists like Jan van Eyck. His compositions almost exclusively feature somnambulant women in various states of undress, sleepwalking seductresses roaming a vaguely Romanesqe dreamscape rife with enigmatic visual allegories.

Julie Mehretu's large-scale, mixed media paintings create a dizzying field of layered landscapes to construct colorful and complex and lines. Throughout her painting process Julie will add architectural and geometric sketches in ink, smudges of acrylic paint and then sand everything down to create a smooth finish. Someone has done us the pleasure of creating GIFs of this process from a PBS video segment called "Systems." See the GIFs and watch the video after the jump...

The mystical and the erotic converge in I:MAGE, a week-long exhibition showcasing the best international artists working today in the emerging genre of esoteric art. More than 16 artists will exhibit their work at Store Street Gallery in Bloomsbury, London, from Sunday May 19th to Saturday May 25th, 2013. The common thread between the exhibiting artists is the internalization of esoteric themes and the externalization of the mythical, the magical, the carnal, and the mysterious in their many forms.