Each of these large paintings depicts a trio of stylized orange, yellow, and pink fluorescent poodle silhouettes in various sexual positions. Formally, the work is a riff on the “Protractor” series of American abstract painter Frank Stella (b.1936), which featured raw canvas separating different colours.

During the 1980s the poodle was a key formal device General Idea employed to represent themselves as queer artists. They seized on the poodle as a means of self-representation due to the animal’s “banal and effete” presence and used it to speak to normative understandings of sexual roles.

This Spotlight is excerpted from General Idea: Life & Work by Sarah E.K. Smith.