Ever since Marcel Duchamp entered his readymade urinal Fountain into the 1917 Salon of the Society of Independent Artists, toilets have been a particularly powerful symbol in the art world. More recently, Maurizio Cattelan picked up on this trope with his satirical, solid gold loo, America (2016), which drew over 100,000 people to the Guggenheim in New York.
These works may seem like, ahem, potty humor, but both are fundamentally concerned with the concept of art, turning everyday items connected to unhygienic bodily ablutions into luxurious sculptures. Today, many contemporary artists are creating new ways of thinking about toilets and bathrooms, asking audiences to consider social codes, gender discrimination, systemic violence, and sexual freedom. Many highlight the inherent eroticism of bathroom decoration, or exaggerate the disgust associated with toilets to question wider cultural discomforts.
Krzysztof Strzelecki’s solo show “Rendezvous” at Anat Ebgi in New York (through May 31st) features urinals and ornate bathroom fittings, painted with the Polish artist’s characteristically joyful scenes of gay cruising. Strzelecki has previously decorated his ceramics with sexual images set amongst luscious greenery. But he was inspired to start working with urban urinal aesthetics after visiting New York’s public bathroom in Central Park, which has shorter, more exposing cubicle doors than he had seen before. “You lose the privacy, but it’s more exciting at the same time,” he said in an interview with Artsy. “It’s so erotic, strange, and uncomfortable.”
His works celebrate the beauty of vintage fittings, such as flushes in phallic shapes, which, unlike many of today’s automated toilets, require physical contact. “The Victorians made such beautiful objects, they were heavy and big, used for decoration,” he said. “For me, this object in itself became very erotic.” After all, decorative toilets conflict with the inherent filth of their use. He likewise contrasts the pleasure of sex with the stigma that is projected onto cruising. “The bathroom has become a ‘clean’ space, but it’s the dirtiest room in the house. It’s the same with sex. It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s often seen as dirty, vulgar, and brutal.”
A three-paneled series of bathroom-esque tiles depicts sexual acts that are difficult to decipher (though their titles—Grope, Blow, and Handjob, all 2025—might give it away), rendered in white on white. They highlight the secrecy of cruising, and the remnants of sexual activity that can be sensed upon entering a public space. Strzelecki describes public bathrooms as “full of sexuality and danger,” coded with unwritten rules. “You can change which urinal you choose, and it already becomes a more uncomfortable or sexual act than just going to the toilet.”
American artist Hugh Hayden has also used the idea of the public bathroom in his conceptual sculpture practice, installing 17 toilet stalls as part of his 2024 show “Hughmans” at Lisson Gallery in New York. The design of the stalls meant that viewers could not see all the works at once and were able to experience private moments with each one (the doors could lock from the inside). The row of white stalls was filled with sculptures. This show explored the collective experience of the toilet, and its potential for intimacy, desire, and sexuality.
Elvis (all works 2024), for instance, is a black sculpture depicting a man’s torso and groin, with a gun in place of a penis. Boogey man comprises a medical cross-section of a body, sliced directly through the genitals like a biology diagram. In another stall, Harlem features a selection of cast iron pots and copper pans, a symbol of the cultural diversity that forged the United States. With its strange layout, the show probed police brutality, toxic masculinity, and the U.S. empire, drawing parallels between the privacy of the toilet stalls’ design and the concealed violence enacted by governments.
Irreverent illustration artist Julie Verhoeven similarly broke down the line between art space and bathroom when she staged The Toilet Attendant … Now Wash Your Hands at the 2016 Frieze London loos. She blasted ’80s hits out of the speakers, cramming the space with tampons, stuffed toys, and disco balls. Verhoeven herself was present as toilet attendant, chatting with visitors: All genders were welcome. While the feel of the installation was joyful and humorous, it carried a deeper social message. In the fair’s words, the work was intended to “open up space for critical thinking on the invisibility of certain working groups and labor ethics.” The toilet was no longer a place for visitors to use without thinking. Instead, by carefully decorating the space and being present herself, Verhoeven reminded visitors of all the labor that goes into providing safe, clean toilets.
Artist and filmmaker John Waters, who refers to himself as a “filth elder,” took on the significance of restrooms in a permanent way when he launched “The John Waters Restrooms” in 2021 at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Subverting the tradition of wealthy patrons having institutional wings named after them, the artist created the first gender neutral toilets at the museum as an expression of his own love for potty humor, and as an open space for everyone to use. “When I heard the new restrooms could be remodeled for all genders, I was even more excited,” Waters said at the time. Trans actor and activist Elizabeth Coffey co-hosted the opening, telling the audience, “Other than the joy and the fun we’re sharing tonight, there are a lot of people that, in many, many places, are driven out of a place where they just want to go to the bathroom.”
Artist Emmett Ramstad has similarly confronted anti-trans bathroom legislation in the U.S. with his series of installations that subvert common design aspects of public toilets. His 2016 mirror work, You’re Welcome, replaced gender-based signage on the front of toilets with friendly messaging. Similarly, Watching You Watching Me Watching You (Hunting Season) (2017), eerily places a looming wooden hunting platform in front of a row of toilet stalls, giving viewers a clear line of sight into the cubicles: a comment on the intrusion of government laws and public discourse. While his works take on a violently contested subject, they also call for communication and reciprocity: In the latter work, the platform places the viewer in a position of vulnerable visibility while they observe.
Elsewhere, British painter Dale Lewis has included toilets in his sprawling paintings which explore class, sex, and disgust. He makes this typically private space raucously public, as in Bratwurst (2017), where a row of loos are overrun with debauchery. One figure projectile vomits into the bowl; another is submerged from the waist down, his legs seeming to disappear into the plumbing. The toilets in this work accentuate the emotions that viewers may already feel at the depraved scenes. Lewis embraces such overt triggers for revulsion, prodding us to question our own judgements of the people depicted in the works. “I like everything to be on the surface and quite obvious so people don’t have to guess it, they can just see,” he has previously said. “People can get really mad looking at these.”
While many artists play with the public space of the toilet, American textile artist Erin M. Riley creates moments of intimacy and discomfort by portraying private domestic bathrooms. Her tapestries depict intense crops and closeups of lone moments at home, with the toilet itself sometimes implied in the background. In Gushing (2024), generic, white bathroom toilets are spotted with red as a hand grips a bloodied cloth in the foreground—while we can see little else of her body, the gesture suggests a figure sitting on the toilet, looking down at menstrual blood.
In all these works, viewers are brought inside the private space of the toilet. It is a space that taps into our own primal feelings of disgust or invasion, as well as our potential for feeling sexual excitement. As a motif or recreated space in art, the toilet brings to focus the best and worst of our culture, a conflicted place of protest, hygiene, shame, and bodily pleasure.